A Brilliant Man

This is Dr. Alan Stern, one of the speakers at the astronomy forum.  He is one of the reasons I came to hear the speakers at the event.  This is the third time I have heard him speak, and he is a wonderful speaker.  He is low key and straightforward, but the story he tells is beyond imagining.  He is the Principal Investigator of the New Horizons project.  That is the interplanetary space probe that has flown from Earth, past Jupiter and on to Pluto where it recorded absolutely stunning images of Pluto for the very first time.  Now it has continued out beyond Pluto, and has just photographed a relatively tiny object called "Ultima Thule," one of the Kuiper Belt objects, which are small bodies or remnants from when the Solar System formed. While many asteroids are composed primarily of rock and metal, most Kuiper belt objects are composed largely of frozen "ices," such as methane, ammonia and water.  Ultima Thule is only 21 miles long, which is like a speck of dust. i

This is a photograph of Ultimate Thule. behind Dr.  Stern.   What is astounding about the New Horizons project is the length of time and the distance the spacecraft traveled.  The spacecraft was launched in 2006 and encountered the Pluto system in 2015, and Ultima Thule in 2019.  It is now 4 billion miles away!