Voyage with Voyager: Summer of '79

September 10:  Made some much needed edits and posted a few new pictures.


Two years since the last post here.  Not that I didn't want to but it's been more than busy here and well one distraction follows another.   I have some Pluto related materials to post but first this . . .

The Voyager launch 40-year anniversary triggered a search for and rediscovery of my olde photos from Voyager, reawakening dormant memories.  It has also strengthened the realization of how intimately my own path has been linked to this grand adventure and to the completion of the Voyager legacy achieved by New Horizons at Pluto; certainly suitable for a new blog.  Emily Lakdawala also asked recently if I could write a blog about Voyager and it made sense to merge the two ideas.  What follows is a very personal story, not a rehash of the mission.  I was not party to the development of or decision making events on the Voyager project and my actual contribution was minuscule (putting it gently).  Nonetheless, participation in Voyager as a young student was both enlightening and a personal high point that has been surpassed only once.  The planetary phase of the mission (kind of a second Apollo) helped launch a few careers of its own over its 12 year duration, mine included.  Maybe there are some lessons in this experience for aspiring young scientists and engineers out there . . .

SUMMER OF 79
It has been a most eventful past 2 years.  The remarkable voyage to Pluto two summers ago was a trip to one of the loftiest summits imaginable and I am most grateful for that opportunity.  My voyage to Pluto began 38 years ago this summer (if you don't count the first 20 years growing up in the 1960's Space Age collecting newspaper clippings and making plastic models).   This is that story and how I got from there to here.  

In the cold of February 1979, North American winters were really winters, the north polar ice cap was still formidable, Alaskan glaciers had not yet begun to melt, and our people believed real evidence when they saw it.  I was a college student at SUNY College at Buffalo, New York.  I was also a backyard astronomer with a standard 2-1/4 inch refractor; and many a cold night were spent on a cold chair with snow crunched beneath my boots.

We didn't know much about the Outer Solar System in 1978.

Then, the moons of Jupiter were dusky points of light.  No-one knew what they might be like, as this early Voyager diagram shows.  This, and my future with it, were about to change radically.  I was in those days what would be called a space groupie, or perhaps fan-boy.  I built all the plastic Revell models of Gemini, Apollo and Saturn V rockets, and collected scrap books full of newspaper clipping of daily reports of our national space program, dating back to Apollo 1.  Yes indeed, in those days we got much of our news and information from newspapers, sheets of paper with type on them that were delivered to your door!  No internet and the none of the propaganda that now plagues it.  Several pages of this scrapbook were devoted to planetary exploration, including Mariner 9 and Viking at Mars.  One page of clippings was reserved to Voyager, a mission to Jupiter and Saturn started in 1972.  The vast icy mysterious uncharted realm of the giant planets had began to capture my imagination.  Lesson 1: follow your passions!

 

I was a bicentennial high school graduate but did not believe I could handle science.  By late 1978, having flunked out of our Fine Arts program, I had discovered geology, and it was fascinating, soaking it up like a sponge.  I was blessed by the guidance and mentorship of Dr. Carl Seyfert, author of the text book "Earth History and Plate Tectonics" and whose father discovered Seyfert galaxies.  Carl had that ‘fire in the belly,’ that genuine enthusiasm for science, logic and curiosity that a young undergraduate was so easily infected with.  In Autumn of 1978 a flyer was posted on the department bulletin board announcing a national Summer Intern Program in planetary sciences. It didn’t take a genius to figure who in the department was going to apply.

Probably the only photo I have of Dr. Carl Seyfert, my undergraduate advisor, 

who understood the importance of mentoring and how to feed a young student's enthusiasm and keep him on track.

The Letter

On 27 February, 1979, a letter arrived with an invitation to go to JPL in Pasadena in July of that year as a Summer Intern.  There was much rejoicing.  Truth is I don’t really recall much of that day except that it was so cool to be selected that I kept the letter and its envelope.  I showed Carl and he was very pleased.  I wanted to go immediately and was a little disappointed I could go to the first big Voyager event.  Voyager 1 was barely a week out from Jupiter and the great discoveries of volcanoes on Io and fractured terrains of Ganymede were very soon to enter my scrapbook.    

more from the scrapbook

This would also be my first adventure outside the western New York – Pennsylvania region I had grown up in.  I arrived at LAX in July '79 a rather naive young man after his first solo flight who promptly spent most of his pocket money on a cab ride to Pasadena.  Ouch.  Despite that, my continued fondness for Pasadena, a charming suburb of LA spread out beneath the San Gabriel Mountains, dates back to this special summer.

Departure from Buffalo.  Mom is on the right.  They could all walk up to the gate back then.
Lesson 2:  Never stand in front of a large window for a portrait.

Flight over Utah and on into Southern California. 

The colors on these photos have all faded a lot and the negatives are missing, but Ive done my best to do some color restoration on them.

Us three Voyager interns all arrived around July 5 with less than one week before the second Voyager encounter with Jupiter.  Later I would learn that Voyager did not have many interns and we were quite fortunate to participate in these unforgettable events.  We were instructed to go direct to Caltech student housing as we were going to be staying in undergrad dorms.  Ricketts House was ours.  Most students had left for the summer.  I still remember exploring its hallways, sitting rooms, and pinball parlor.   I remember exploring the campus library to read old documents.  While the halls and courtyards have not changed, some things have. The campus cafeterias are completely unrecognizable as is the 21st century cuisine, no longer the old 1979 fare.  I was introduced to home-made tacos here, and often used the outdoor Caltech pool across California Ave., now being remodeled I think.  I also remember waking one morning to what sounded like cannon fire only to find that a 20' long steel tube had been erected in the courtyard outside my window and students were firing tennis balls into the surrounding neighborhood with it.  Engineering students probably.

Courtyards and rooftop at Ricketts House, Caltech, home for the Summer of 79.

The daily 9-passenger shuttle van from Caltech to JPL.

My Voyager badges.  Intern badge is at left.  More badges would follow including a very important one in 2015 but these are the most valuable in the collection.

The JPL entrance in those days.

Voyager was in fact a sort of Frankenstein mission, reassembled from the dead remains of a much grander concept, appropriately named the Grand Tour.  Grand Tour was conceived in 1966 as a 4 probe mission to the 4 gas giant planets plus Pluto, all in one "shot."  The 2 Voyagers would instead visit Jupiter and Saturn and if lucky one would go on to Uranus and Neptune.  Pluto was left in the cold.  For now.  In 1979, Voyagers adventure was just beginning and no-one was talking about Pluto, yet.

I was assigned to the Science Investigation Support Team (SIST), which was tasked with implementing the designed for the various observation plans of the 11 or so Voyager Science Teams.  I was NOT going to be assigned to the imaging (or any other) science team, as the Viking interns had been back during the Mars landings in 1976.   But I didn’t care a whit; I was in the center of things, part of the great adventure, barely 20 years old, naive and eager.

Our first day at JPL was to get badged and introduced.  I was assigned to work with Dr. Ellis Miner, one of the nicest and smartest individuals I've ever worked with. He was in charge of planning for the Saturn encounters in late 1980 and 1981 (Saturn had not been visited by any spacecraft at this point).  His assistant was Jude Montalbano (now Diner) and they would be my mentors during the Summer of '79.  I would get to know many on the Voyager SIST team, including the coordinator for the Infrared Investigation Science (or IRIS) team, Linda Horn (now Spilker).  Linda is now the Project Scientist for the Cassini orbiter mission at Saturn!

Building 264, where Voyager occupy several floors.  Ours was floor 3.

My desk space, I think.  Not sure why I would photograph it if it wasn't.  The TV monitors were ubiquitous at JPL and allowed us to view all the Jupiter images as they came down.

Jude Montalbano, one of my advisors the Summer of '79.

The JPL entrance Mall featured this giant trajectory map,  showing the locations of the two Voyagers in late Summer 1979.  A similar board is there now and it is a lot busier with many active missions displayed.

So what does a 20 year old undergraduate student with no experience do when they join a major space mission about to reach its first main objective?  He gets to know the copy machine very well.   In essence I was put to work as a “gopher,” a contraction of “can you GO-FOR this or can you GO-FOR that?”   In those days a lot of work was done on paper and large print-outs, especially for quick-look analysis of instrument performance and transmittal of information between project sections.  I loved it.  Every minute was an exposure to something new and I got to see how how projects like Voyager actually worked, behind the press conferences.  I also got to see new data as it arrived; we all got to see the images live as they were received and displayed on the TV monitors stationed around the lab.   

La Brea Tar Pit

Tree-lined streets on the Caltech campus.  Not like Buffalo . . . 

It wasn't all work.  After the main Jupiter encounter phase had ended us student types could afford to take some weekends off and explore the region.  Day trips included mineral collecting in the Mojave and near Palomar (I still have most of those specimens including ulexite and tourmaline), the beach, LA's famous amusement parks, a few concerts, even a day trip to San Francisco on my own.  Most of the time we ate on campus or went into town along Lake Ave. for eats and stuff.  Olde Town Pasadena was a run-down area and its restoration had not yet started.

LA skyline in 1979.  It's changed, just a wee bit. 

To Griffith Park Observatory, fast as lightning!

Hollywood Bowl, just before Bugs Bunny got to it I assume.

Mineral hunting in the Mojave.  I still have those minerals, including a sample of ulexite (aka TV-stone).

Driving back through the Mojave Desert near Coyote Dry Lake.

Point Mugu beach

Day trip to San Francisco.  Cable Cars!

What summer in LA would be complete without trips to Disneyland, Magic Mountain and Knotts Berry Farm!

My companion interns of 1979 posing on the Caltech lawn, next to our dorm.  
Sadly, I never kept up with them and don't know what they are up to.

One of only two selfies during my Voyager internship, taken during a daily science briefing.  I don't know who took it tho.
That is Dr. Ed Stone, Voyager Project Scientist in the center, me behind him on the left listening in.

The gopher type of work continued for a few weeks until the critical activity of Jupiter encounter receded.  Then we began work on my task for the rest of the Summer.   I was going to make maps of the major Saturnian moons, in this case to map out where the images planned for these as yet uncharted moons were going to line up on the surface.  The goal was to make sure all longitudes were covered and that there were no gaps in the planned coverage that would need to be fixed.  After all, there were no plans to return to Saturn at that point and Voyager was it.

In 1979 Macintosh computers did not yet exist and computer time was expensive and needed for key tasks.  How were these maps to be made?  Out came the graph paper, rulers and protractors.  We did not need precision maps, just simple maps that showed the coverage areas so the plan could be updated to fix any gaps.  Taking advantage of simple concepts such as emission and incidence angles, I was able to map out where the less shadowed and the more shadowed areas of each image would plot on the global map; and the shadowy areas would have the best feature definition.   As it happens, these maps were good approximations of the maps Voyager would ultimately acquire.  Not bad for protractor and graph paper.

I learned some simple but basic truths about mapping that summer, tho my interest in maps had always been there.  I had no idea in 1979 that I would eventually be making the real global maps of these moons years later with the actual data from Voyager and the as yet unconceived Cassini mission, which ends in September 2017.

That spring and summer of '79 was the central foundation of all that followed, revealing the outrageous diversity and complexity of physical, chemical and geologic processes going on in the Outer Solar System.  Voyager at Jupiter overturned all our expectations about icy moons being cold relicts of ancient times (remember the first chart at top?).  At each of the planetary systems that Voyager explored new things were discovered and yet more wonders of nature unraveled.  From the rings of Saturn to the storms of Neptune we were amazed.  We were not prepared and Voyager at Jupiter was the key to opening up our imagination.  

It's a major award!

That spring and summer of '79 was also my foundation, the beginning of a own long and winding road that led to Pluto and hopefully beyond.  I had no idea as I opened that letter what path lay in front of me; there would be many odd detours, wrong turns that became right turns, and even a little bit of good luck.  Only the Pluto Summer of ’15 could match the excitement and wonder of that Jupiter Summer, but at the same time there was the very real sense that I was were I was supposed to be, and that I had been in training for the mapping of Pluto for almost 40 years.  That summer remains fixed in my memory as a grand event and the start of it all.

None of this happened by accident.  Alan Stern tells the story how at the time of Voyager's last encounter, with Neptune in 1989, a small group of scientists and engineers got together with the determination to finish the Voyager/Grand Tour plan and get to Pluto (still the only other object beyond Neptune known).  Only 12 years later, the New Horizons team and project had been selected, and I played a modest though useful role in that birth.  Years later at encounter I was on board as Pluto mapper and I think it is fair to say that there was the very real sense that we were all indeed finally completing the original Grand Tour design by completing the first exploration of Pluto.  

Similarly, when I was a graduate student I could envision no other job than to map and understand the icy moons that orbit the giant planets.  There were many obstacles and many opportunities, none of which could have been taken advantage of without the resolution to make it happen.  Determination does mean much without the stuff to back it up and that means doing the best possible work; making yourself indispensable.  Sometimes a little help is useful too.  I was blessed with two great advisors during my college days, as well as working with Ellis and Jude on Voyager.   While I have certainly published a fair number of papers and discoveries, it was those skills in map making, initiated as a Voyager intern, honed through practice and experimentation, and built on the shoulders of giants (Alfred McEwen comes to mind) that made it possible to work on New Horizons and create those beautiful mosaics of Pluto and Charon, the most distant objects ever mapped.  Thank you NASA! 

There are other memories of the Summer of 1979 worth noting.  Each new image from Voyager was flashed up on small black and white TVs scattered across the Lab, and it was amazing to follow the encounter as Jupiter loomed larger on our monitors with each passing day.   It is difficult to imagine a better time to be involved in exploration.  I remember vividly when the first high-resolution images of Europa appeared on our monitors.  Voyager 1 had not seen Europa well so this time Europa was the big new story.  We were in a small staff meeting of about 5 or 6 people, and the images were due sometime around noon if I recall correctly.  We all looked up at the appointed time and there was this strange looking sphere with all sorts of crazy lines on it.  They were not the best images that the Voyagers obtained at Jupiter in terms of resolution, but they were some of the most important.  The images showed about 25% of Europa and revealed an alien landscape that looked like a cross between a cracked Easter egg and a Jackson Pollock painting.   There was no time that day to realize that this image was going to figure prominently in future exploration developments.

The color version of a part of the only high resolution mosaic obtained of Europa by Voyager.  At a resolution of only 2 km, it was the worst of any of the 4 large moons, but it was among the most dramatic.

When I returned to Buffalo, Carl and I talked about the summer and being on the Voyager project.  I gave a lecture for the department on the experience.  I also had the enthusiastic support of Professors Jim Orgren and John Mack.  Carl and Jim are gone now and while I was a frequent return visitor and was always happy to meet with my old professors when I visited Buffalo, these visits stopped around 2002 and I haven't seen them since.  It is always good to keep in touch with those who have helped you on your way. 

Probably the most important chat I had with him was sometime in October that year. Carl and I were looking at the color view of Europa above up on the projector screen in the geology classroom.  At first glance the pattern looks hopeless.  Myriad crossing lines with no seeming sense or pattern.  During this chat I noticed a peculiar pattern in one area of "wedge-shaped bands."  There were a set of "piercing points," a structural term to refer to older features broken when a lateral fault in the crust displaces the crust either side of the fault.  Lateral movement was something only known on Earth and indicated the icy shell of Europa was moving around.  We both understood intuitively what this meant.

We called it "plate tectonics," for which we caught some flak (!), and indeed it would prove to be a Europan version of the dynamic convective process we see on Earth causing earthquakes and volcanic chains.  I confess that Carl, an expert of sorts on the then relatively new field of terrestrial plate tectonics, understood more of what the geophysical implications were for the interior, me being a mere student, but it was clear to him that this was important enough to present to our colleagues and I gave my first presentation at a science conference at AGU in Toronto (a two-hour drive) the following May.

The rest of this story is more complicated and worth its own blog.  It took 9 years to get that article published (Icarus, 1979) and in that time I learned more of my craft, finishing graduate school at Washington University in Saint Louis, where I met professor Bill McKinnon, to whom I owe everything else; but more on that later.

The structural diagram showing plate motions on Europa, before and after,
derived from the color image shown above.  

CODA

Two years after my first Voyager Summer, I was invited back to be part of the Voyager 2 encounter with Saturn in the summer of 1981.  I was now a graduate student at Northern Illinois University.  I don’t remember much about that summer, except of course Saturn, looming larger in our monitors each day.  I was working for Linda Horn (now Spilker) on the Voyager IRIS infrared detector; and it pleases me no end to see 35 years later Linda serve as Project Scientist (kinda the boss) of the Cassini project now orbiting the ringed planet!  

The big day in 1981 was August 25, with our best moons and rings images, and the pass behind Saturn and through the ring plane.  If successful the first ever visit to planet Uranus would be a go.  This was scheduled right near midnight local time; as was my habit I stayed up late on lab to experience the event.  The time arrived for the lock onto signal, but within minutes people were saying there was a problem.  The signal arrived on time but the telemetry revealed that several things were not as they should be.  Not only was the scan platform fouled up, unable to point its cameras at Saturn, but the hoped-for Uranus encounter 3 years later was now at risk.

Some scenes from Summer of '81.  Linda Spilker is in top photo.

It felt like a kick in the gut, that same feeling would happen again one week before Pluto encounter when New Horizons went into safing.  Then, as at Pluto, experts on the project focused on understanding the problem, but there was considerable relief across the lab in late August 1981 when Saturn returned to our monitors 3 days later, and with more testing and validation Uranus was on! 

Three and a half years later I was a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis, under Dr. Bill McKinnon.  I had hoped to go with him to experience this one too, but I was having a lot of trouble passing my degree qualifying exams and was not allowed to go.  On the morning of January 28, four days after the encounter, I awoke to see if CNN was reporting any new images or discoveries (still no internet), only to see that Challenger had been destroyed just minutes before.  It took days for the emotional numbness to dissipate as we all slowly went back to our studies.

Flash forward 3 more years and I am now a post-doc at JPL, back where it all started, and 10 years later in the summer of ’89 we were writing the end of the Voyager story, as far as the planetary phase was concerned.  I was not part of the project this time, but with TV monitors everywhere the entire Lab was again a witness to the unfolding drama of Neptune, its storms and its large moon, Triton.  We did not even know Triton's size as the summer began but eventually we saw the bright icy disk and word spread that they had a diameter (which was further refined as we got closer).  With Bill in town to be part of the celebration, which was what it became, some of our friends on the project (for lack of a better word) “snuck” us into the imaging team rooms where we had a front seat at the encounter.  A day later, Chuck Barry performed on the JPL Mall that evening as several thousand employees gathered to celebrate, and he performed “Voyager Be Good” if memory serves.

So in a very real sense, Voyager was central to my career, and shaped what I do today.  An example is New Horizons.  The mission to Pluto, with a stop-over at Jupiter, is in a very real sense Voyager 3.  It completed the original goals of the Grand Tour, delayed and hence with better remote sensing instruments, but a completion nonetheless.  We did not know about the thousands of other icy bodies in the trans-Neptune region back then, but the amazing discoveries at Pluto seem to be telling us that it is going to be region full of surprises; every reason to go back and see as much of the Kuiper Belt as we can.

As protractor was put to paper 38 years ago this summer, did I dream  that years later I would actually be making global maps of these moons from the real images, either from Voyager or from the later Galileo and Cassini orbital missions?   I'm not sure, but I had no clue that the skills I began to learn in making those simple maps would put me directly in line to make our maps of cold distant Pluto (and subject of the next post)!  Not only was the Voyager cycle completed at Pluto but the path from those early ruler-and-protractor maps to global mapping of Saturn's moons and Pluto/Charon was also now complete.

Mapping progression from planning maps (top) to actual maps from Voyager and then Cassini, finally to Pluto.

Emily, in her request, asked me to keep young scientists in mind.  As you can tell, that Voyager intern Summer of '79 left a lasting impression.  Hoping to avoid the error of being lofty and pontifical, let me close with a few thoughts.  Seize opportunities.  Done successfully and enthusiastically, such gifts are stepping stones to higher things.  Whenever I mentor a Summer Intern at the LPI I look for young people with talent who have had no prior opportunity to test themselves and see what they can do, much like a 20-year out of Buffalo 38 years ago.  When such opportunities happen, remember to thank your mentors years later.  I was very fortunate to have several!  Follow your passion, follow your talents.  I can’t integrate my way out of a paper bag but I know how to make a good map, and I know plate tectonics when I see it.  Don't be afraid to follow what excites you; mentors should encourage native talent as much as possible.  Always be inquisitive, and whatever you do, do it extremely well.   Never accept the easy answer until it is tested.  Double check everything, attack a problem for all perspectives and with all relevant data sets.  If you need help, seek it out in others and work together.  In this way a simple story about a landslide on Io helped unlocked the puzzle of how non-volcanic mountains can form on a volcanic world.  A little arrogance is useful but so is a little humility.  Keep the arrogance inside; nobody likes seeing it.  Beg for mercy when you show up 5 minutes late for your first conference presentation as your advisor’s student (think John Belushi and Carrie Fischer in Blues Brothers).  Enjoy it! Discovery is a real rush so seek it out and make it happen.
 

Happy Anniversary Voyager and thanks!

PLUTO!

Pluto image acquired July 11, 2015

Pluto minus 2 days.  It has been an amazing approach to Pluto over the past two weeks, as those of you following the mission on the web have shared.  This will be very short as I am quite busy, but for me it is mind boggling how strange Pluto seems, as you can see for yourself in the above press released image.  I can almost imagine myself standing on the bridge of the Enterprise approaching an alien world for the first time.  "Fascinating!"  So much of the surface seems unfamiliar.  Speculation among scientists and web followers has been abundant and I won't indulge myself here, but rather celebrate how insanely wondrous of celestial neighborhood is.  Everywhere we look in the Solar neighborhood we see something different, and very often, something we did not expect.  Clearly Pluto fits the later, and even Ceres, though it looks like an older cratered world, has enough surprises to keep us working for years to come (odd-shaped mountains, odd-shaped craters, bright spots).  Even the Saturn system has new surprises (soon to be revealed).  All tell us important clues to how the Solar System came to be and how it has evolved.  Perhaps the most important benefit has been philosophical. The past 50 years of Space Exploration have been a great experience to live through, and offer an opportunity to look up from our troubled times here on Earth and see something greater.  Enjoy Pluto . . . !

New Horizons trajectory as of July 12 midday.
Nothing else gives a sense of how close we are to target.

Below is an image of Triton taken on approach by Voyager 2 in August 1989 at a pixel scale of ~4 kilometers.  This was the first Voyager image to more clearly show recognizable basic elements of Tritonian geology (though much still remains mysterious to this day), before it's closer pass on August 25 of that year.  We may peel away some of Pluto's deeper mysteries in a similar way.

One Month

Pluto!  June 16, 2015: 4 weeks to go - the final month.  To mark that milestone, New Horizons has just released a new video about Pluto and the mission on its main website.  Oh sure, I am in it so I'm rather pleased about that, but it is a very high quality production and most importantly highlights the people behind the mission.  Let me just say up front that my contributions to New Horizons thus far have been minimal.  True I did serve on several key panels back in 1999-2000 that helped decide how we would explore the planetary system we know as Pluto and it is gratifying to see that process come to fruition.  In later years I helped advocate for and design dedicated stereo observations to map topography on Pluto and Charon, prepared new global maps of Triton and Saturn's icy moon that will support interpretation of Pluto and its moons, and finally was added onto the project a few years ago as a member of the Team.  The years of planning to prepare the long series of observations that began in January and will reach their climax in 4 weeks was the work of a Team, some of whom were or are now friends (I trust) and some of whose names I hope will become more familiar very soon.  They are too numerous to list here, but they will have earned their place in history.  Happily, many of them are featured in this new video.

The New Horizons project Team is quite busy making sure everything goes according to plan (and post-encounter activities will be no less busy).  The Science Team is currently busy searching approach images for rings and more moons (none yet), making the first low-resolution maps of the surface to chart out the gross brightness patterns and major provinces, looking at the properties of the known moons, and will soon begin to detect the surface components on Pluto and Charon.  These results are regularly posted to the main NH website.  I don't have anything to do just yet; I arrive at APL on the 30th and my job starts in earnest about 12 days out (around July 2) as Pluto starts its final two rotations before closest approach.  Then we start to build piece-by-piece the ultimate highest resolution maps of Pluto and Charon and a few days before encounter day on the 14th start work on the first topographic maps of the surface.

I will also be bring my 30 years of experience mapping other icy worlds in the Outer Solar System, now including ice-rich Ceres, another small planetary body orbiting the Sun.  Whether it proves of any value remains to be seen, of course.  Pluto may look like nothing we have seen before.  Triton bears little resemblance to the menagerie of icy bodies orbiting the other giant planets, and Pluto may be yet another odd-ball.  That is why I have been reticent to speculate on Pluto's appearance.  I think it fair to assume that mighty Charon may look generally similar tho different in detail to Dione and Tethys (which are similar in size); heavily cratered with maybe some fractures or smooth areas.  But Pluto?  While it is logical to expect some impact craters and some erosion (due to the seasonal migration of volatile frosts) I was not very successful predicting much about Ceres, so I will defer to Pluto's mysteries.

As we prepare for Pluto, my colleagues and I on Dawn are also very busy working with the new 400-meter resolution Survey mapping images of Ceres.  To be sure, we see some spectacular impact craters and albedo deposits and we can now resolve quite a few very interesting and perhaps surprising surface features (more on those later).  This was hoped for and even expected, but the new images are also reinforcing another perception.  Namely, that some of the "features" we thought we "saw" at low resolution during approach and thought were significant, such as large canyons and lobate scarps, either do not in fact exist or are cryptic or rather uninteresting.  Many of the images of icy satellites based on Voyager are at resolutions comparable to our approach images of Ceres.  Our views from Galileo and Cassini in the Jupiter and Saturn systems increased our resolutions by 100+ fold and the places look very different and vastly more complex and interesting.  The resolutions we are getting from Dawn at Ceres now and will get this summer and fall when we get down to 150 and 40 meters are and will be an eye opener, as will the 250- to 100-m resolution Pluto images.

The 80's-style metal hair-band staying at our hotel during a recent New Horizons team meeting in Maryland.
Just checking if you are paying attention!

As if Pluto and Ceres weren't enough to keep one busy, I've been working on some new findings on one of Enceladus' neighboring moons.  Our team is working to map and understand these in preparation for publication and we hope to report them here in a week or so.   Many events and projects are happening very fast this Summer and I am 'proud, happy and thrilled' to be a small part of them, but there are times when one feels like you are riding in a barrel down the Niagara River with only a teaspoon to steer with (I grew up in Buffalo, just a 20 minute drive from the mighty cataracts). It's a wild ride, with the greatest excitement to come in a few weeks, but wow am I gonna need a vacation by December . . .

Two Months!

[Edited May 29]

Two months, Eight and half weeks, 58 days.  It's a concept almost too difficult to grasp: we are on Pluto's doorstep.   Just 9 years ago I witnessed the launch of New Horizons (the only launch I've ever witnessed in person; although I did some model rocket launches as a kid I don't think they count).  And 85 years since Pluto was discovered, just weeks after the Great Stock Market Crash.  Think of the monumental changes here on Earth since that time.  How time flies.  

The idea that the first Pluto encounter will happen in just 2 months is very exciting.  The encounter started in January when distant observations began, but for geologists like myself, the Pluto encounter will be a very short thing, about 6 days long.  That is the period of Pluto's rotation (or the length of a Pluto "day").  It is the time over which we will see each side of Pluto at its best, including the moments of closet approach on July 14, when we see one side of Pluto (and is large moon Charon) at better than 250 meter resolution (and parts as good as 100 meters!).  Us geology types need to see volcanoes, fractures, craters, and that requires resolutions of better than 10 kilometers, which we will likely start seeing during the final Pluto rotation begins on July 8.  The largest craters or fracture systems may be visible before then.

We have not and will not be idle on approach, however.   Features on Pluto movie.   New Horizons is already spotting features, including a possible polar cap and a bright spot near the equator.  Bright spots often tend to be recently formed impact craters, say in the past 100 million years or less, but we will have to wait till July to know.  We may even see linear features like the dark bands on Europa during our approach.  The plucky probe is routinely monitoring the Pluto system and can start searching for unknown moons, having now observed all 5 of the known moons.  If there are any rings, we could find out sometime in June or July.

What will I be doing in July?  Besides being in residence at the JHU Applied Physics Lab in Maryland for the encounter, I will also be helping lead the cartography effort, registering high-resolution images to the surface of Pluto and its large moon Charon to produce the first preliminary maps of these bodies.  These maps will be updated as the data are slowly returned to Earth from great distance (the radio signal takes 4.4 hours to get back to Earth!)  These maps will look a little bit like the map of Triton we made from Voyager 2 images acquired in 1989.  There will be a north polar gap and one side will be kind of fuzzy, but who's complaining!  I will also be using stereo to map the surfaces of both bodies, and from that we plan to get the best topographic maps of the heights of things on Pluto and Charon!

Voyager 2 map of Triton; a preview of the kind of global map we can expect for Pluto (and Charon), only better.

Pluto/Charon science I'll be most interested in will be crater morphology.  Craters can tell us about what is buried under the surface, how hot the interior has been, and other interesting things, which I'll try to blog on soon.  After all, impact craters are the one geologic feature we can (almost) guarantee we will find on Pluto and Charon.  I will also help those looking for volcanoes or tectonic structures.  Most ice worlds also have some fault scarps and fractures, but until now we have mapped only icy bodies orbiting in close proximity to large planets, which can impose strong gravitational stresses on moon interiors.  Pluto and Ceres both are the first examples of ice-rich worlds we have visited that orbit the Sun alone, uninfluenced by a large parent body.  "Fascinating."

Which brings me to Ceres.  We have now completed the observation phase called RC3, "rotation characteristics 3," in which Dawn observed the entire surface of the dwarf planet from the north, the south and over the equator.  One of those sequences has been released in movie form, allowing everyone to see many of things we have seen from RC3.  I can't say too much about any of these yet, except that the team is pouring over the data, which has a pixel resolution of 1.25 kilometers.  This is comparable to what Voyager saw during its tour of the icy moons back in the 1980s.  The next mapping phases in June, August and November will bring us Galileo and Cassini class imaging at better than 400 meters resolution, and ultimately down to ~38 meters.

A still from the recently released rotation movie of ice-rich Ceres.  The complex and still enigmatic Bright Spots are at center.  Faint arcuate troughs also cross the scene.  These emanate from a large impact basin to the south.

I'm still not sure what these features all mean.  It recalls the Galileo and Cassini experience where we saw entirely new features when we got down to smaller than 1 kilometer resolutions.  It was like we had never seen Europa, Ganymede, Enceladus, Dione or any of the other icy moons before!  Much will become clearer when we get to lower altitude on Ceres.  I am looking at crater morphologies on Ceres, measuring diameters, looking at ejecta, including some of the bright and dark ray patterns you can see in the rotation movie, and looking at pit craters, too.  Right now we are mostly working to inventory what is on the surface, formulating hypotheses to test when the next data arrive in June.   We are very busy!

Pages from my Planetary Scrapbook, 1971-1980.
There were so many Buffalo News newspaper clippings I had to overlap them.

Which gets me to the end of today's rant.  When time permits (which is scant these days) I monitor the buzz on forums such as Unmannedspaceflight, which is an open forum for those interested in the Solar System.  Some have noted a reticence on some projects and science teams to be more forthcoming in data release or science discussion.  There is some truth to that.  Some flights are better than others (I won't name names), and it is something I can't change.   Dawn is pretty darn good, and New Horizons will release all images in browse format, within 48 hours of acquisition, for example.  I am part of the Mariner and Voyager generation, where the only outlet for new planetary information and images was the newspaper and the 3 networks' nightly news (which might have a 2 minute report on the day after encounter), followed some days later by the weekly news magazines of the time.  That was it.  I still have my newspaper clippings from those days.  No blogs, twitter, websites, videos or anything.  And a year later the data were archived for general use.  The science teams have an obligation to themselves and the public.  The first is to get the data in suitable format so that the data products that are released are of good quality and do not have incorrect orientations or colors (recalling the false blue skies from the first Viking lander image); and to avoid premature speculations that might be difficult to retract later on.  It takes a few days to prepare good stuff.  Patience young padawans . . . the data returned from these fantastic missions belongs to all of us, supported by the public through their taxes and part of the national trust.  The mission and science teams are working hard to get the best products out for everyone to enjoy and to join in the analysis and speculations.  These new worlds will be ours to enjoy all Summer!

Ceres Gets Real: Pluto Lurks

Although we are still along way from understanding this fascinating little body, Ceres is finally becoming a real planet with recognizable features!  And thats kinda cool.  The now-released images from February show features roughly 4 kilometers across (2.2 miles for the americans), including numerous well-preserved impact craters.  These are distinct and clearly show central peaks superficially similar to what we observe on Dione and Tethys.  They appear to be about as deep as expected, but measurements of their depths will be done on higher resolution data.  Some circular features look rather like flattened craters, but again as to origins (whether relaxed by deformation of ice or by erosion or infilling), caution is in order as we are often fooled at these low resolutions.

Global map of Ceres at 4 km/pixel (this is my version of the map that was released on March 2,
and is NOT an official map product).  

So, Ceres has impact craters, some of which could be modified by geologic processes.  It might also have some tectonic features, though it is still too early to be sure of their extent, age, or importance.    It even has those enigmatic bright-spots (sorry no speculations at this point!), which hint at the possibility of more water-ice related features at higher resolution.  All-in-all, though, it is nice to finally have a sense of Ceres as a body, even if that view is rather fuzzy at the moment.  This bodes very well for the approaching mapping campaign.

Although there are still suggestions of linear features in the new images, our experience with similar-sized icy worlds orbiting Saturn is that only the most dramatic canyons are readily apparent at the current resolution.  Tectonic features like simple fault scarps or cracks won't be obvious until April (we have spent most of March on the dark side of Ceres at some distance thrusting the ion engines in order to achieve our first mapping orbit on April 22).  Indeed, many of Tethys' smaller scale fractures require resolutions down to 100 meters, which we won't see at Ceres till this Summer.  Indeed it is likely that Ceres may not betray many of its most interesting ice-related features till we get down to our formal mapping altitudes where resolutions will be a kilometer or less.

The most intriguing linear features are arcuate grooved radiating from a large southern impact basin roughly 250 kilometers across.  Although these could be tectonic, the arcuate shape is consistent with secondary impact features related to the formation of the basin.  The key test will occur when we get 1-km data or better and can examine the detailed morphology.

Here are some Cassini images of Tethys, shown similar to our views of Ceres in mid- and late-April.  By the last week of April we should be acquiring images at resolutions of 1.3 kilometers, although at different phase angles as this 2-week-long RC3 phase goes to completion.

Tethys at 1.3 km/pixel (similar to Ceres during RC3).  Smooth regions, many craters, and the largest fracture system, Ithaca Chasma are all very recognizable but the small fractures and crater chains across the surface are not yet apparent.

Dione at 1.3 km/pixel (similar to Ceres during RC3).  This exquisite image shows many features, including the relaxed craters at upper right (with prominent central peaks), the large 350-km-wide impact basin at top, the multiple fracture sets at left, and the smooth plains at right.

PLUTO

There are times in any great adventure when the pulse quickens just a little and the stomach tightens up a notch.  I think I have finally reached that point with Pluto.  Two weeks ago we passed the 1-AU point.  One AU is the Earth-Sun distance (and yes the tiny Earth does orbit the gigantic Sun), which isn't much more than an anthropomorphic milestone.  But we are also now well passed the half-way  point between Neptune's orbit and our destination.  After 9 years of travel (not to mention a decade or more of work to get New Horizons approved, built and launched), it gives one a sense that we are really on final approach.  We have passed to second-to-last signpost on the long trek.  The last significant sign-post will be when we reach the distance where our high-resolution camera gets images roughly equivalent to the Hubble Space telescope, sometime in May.  We cannot give a precise date for this as the HST and LORRI imaging systems have different optical characteristics and whatnot.  The Project will let us know when we cross this threshold.  Still it will be the real mark that we are into new territory.

For the geology types out there (self included), we will not be getting resolvable data until a few weeks before arrival.  That doesn't mean we won't be doing anything.  New Horizons is in Approach Phase, during which the Pluto system is under routine monitoring.  This will allow us to track all the known moons to get precise orbits and monitor brightness changes to determine rotation periods and such.  We are also looking for new moons and even ring systems, if they exist.  So we will be very busy during approach doing things that Earth-bound telescopes can't do as well.  I will have more on Pluto later this Spring.