LJWorld.com / Pluto mission chief honors discoverer’s 100th birthday

Archive for Sunday, February 5, 2006

February 5, 2006

Alan Stern encounters Kansas astronomer Clyde Tombaugh’s famous discovery of Pluto every day.

Stern is the principal investigator of NASA’s New Horizons mission that launched on Jan. 19 to the small, distant planet and beyond.

“The solar system is littered with planets like Pluto,” Stern said, calling them ice dwarfs compared with the rest of the solar system.

Photo by Jared Soares

Alan Stern presents a slide show about the planet Pluto during a celebration honoring the 100th birthday of Kansas University alumnus and astronomy pioneer Clyde Tombaugh. The Saturday night lecture by the Pluto mission chief was held at Alderson Auditorium in the Kansas Union.

Stern spoke to more than 100 people Saturday night at the Kansas Union on what would have been Tombaugh’s 100th birthday.

Tombaugh died in 1997. He discovered Pluto on Feb. 18, 1930, while working at the Lowell Observatory near Flagstaff, Ariz., and he later earned two degrees from Kansas University.

“He had developed such an interest in astronomy he started writing observatories,” Stern said.

And Stern told the audience the history of Tombaugh’s initial discovery. He kept it to himself for months so that he could double- and triple-check his work.

“It turned out Clyde was entirely right,” he said.

Stern also spoke about how in the half-century that followed Tombaugh’s discovery, astronomers discovered Charon, a smaller satellite that orbits Pluto, and other similar icy planets beyond Pluto in what is now known as the Kuiper Belt.

“It is simply the brightest member of a structure that was not even heard of until the 1990s,” he said.

Stern, of Boulder, Colo., is also the executive director of the Southwest Research Institute’s Space Science and Engineering Division.

The New Horizons Mission’s spacecraft will relay images to Earth from Jupiter in March 2007; Pluto and Charon in July 2015; and from the Kuiper Belt from 2016 to 2020.

“It’s essentially a wonderland for scientists,” Stern said.