Nine years from now, to the day, where will you be and what will you be doing? Scientists and engineers staked $700 million on the belief that they could answer that question precisely – within a few minutes – for a small spacecraft 3 billion miles away. Science and technology produce headlines at a rate that desensitizes us. Sending humanity to the moon is half-century old news. Manipulating our genetic code, using satellites to uncover ancient ruins beneath our feet – our society forgets, or never knows, the thousands of hours of labor, research, and frustration that goes into each. So in addition to uncovering a wealth of new knowledge about everyone’s favorite controversial planet, Pluto, it is worth appreciating NASA’s New Horizons mission for its audacious – and successful – attempt to thread a long, expensive needle through the uncertainty of the outer solar system.

Funding for the mission was secured in 2002 – and less than four years later, on January 19, 2006, New Horizons had launched out of the atmosphere on the beginning of “a long, cold trip”, as Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh mildly stated.

The New Horizons team, led by Alan Stern, identified the information they hoped the mission would obtain in order to classify it as a success, as well as additional secondary and tertiary objectives it would try to meet and in what priority. These goals informed the design of the 1,000 pound, 7’x7’x9’ probe (below, information from NASA’s “New Horizons Fact Sheet”).

New Horizon Fact Sheet

The success criteria also set the size of the window – time window as well as the spatial target – at which the probe would need to arrive at Pluto in order to make the observations needed to achieve its objectives. After traveling 3 billion miles, including slingshotting around Jupiter to reach a speed of 14 miles per second, the mission’s target was a slice of space 36 miles by 57 miles wide. And remarkably, 3,463 days after launch, the 3-minute Pluto flyby had to occur within a 9-minute window.

While the technical details of how this was achieved may bore many, the accomplishment is worthy of universal admiration. Over its 9-year mission, only six commands to correct course were given to New Horizons. For over a year at a time, the probe would be in “hibernation” mode without communication to Earth to conserve fuel. By the time it reached Pluto, commands sent at the speed of light would take 4.5 hours to travel from Earth to New Horizons; therefore, the sequence of maneuvers and measurements taken during the 3-minute flyby were executed on autopilot according to pre-programmed instructions. At the 3-minute culmination of 9 years and 700 million dollars, scientists on Earth had no indication of its success or failure, as all the probe’s instruments were oriented away from Earth, toward Pluto. 22 hours later, scientists received a transmission confirming they had hit the bullseye.

New Horizons was literally a shot in the dark – but a painstakingly calculated and game-planned shot in the dark. The mission team judiciously used the periods out of hibernation to make small course adjustments and instrument calibrations. They determined that the launch had to be within the first 23 days of January 2006, in order to ensure that Jupiter was in the right position to provide a gravity assist (the curve at Jupiter’s orbit in the image below). The force of the giant celestial body was factored in perfectly to bring New Horizons to its date with Pluto within a 9 minute timeframe. Between July 4-7, 2015, a week before the long-awaited flyby, NASA engineers troubleshot a software glitch that prevented New Horizons from making scientific observations, despite the hours-long delay to transmit commands to the probe.

New Horizons Mission (From Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory – Follow New Horizons’ continuing mission!)

This is the promise of science. It may not be accurate to say we can control nature, but as we deepen our understanding of it, we can work in concert with nature to execute incredibly complex feats of engineering. But to succeed in these endeavors, responsible, deliberate goal-setting and planning are crucial. Large-scale scientific undertakings are littered with examples of many hours and dollars pumped into projects that never reach fruition, like the fifteen miles of tunnels in Texas that were to constitute the world’s largest particle accelerator before rising costs and mismanagement led Congress to cancel the project. However, when political will is coupled with responsible management, humanity can thread a needle on the edge of the solar system.