Original subtitles

(Jason) Nine and a half years ago,

a spacecraft called New Horizons set off on a mission to Pluto.

Now it's about to arrive.

Right now the New Horizons spacecraft

is about to rendezvous with a planet no bigger than Alaska.

Just 1,400 miles across.

The most ambitious space shot ever.

Pluto has always had the power to inspire.

From Walt Disney back in the '30s...

(clamoring)

...to an outraged public in the '90s.

But the truth is, Pluto is a place we know so little about.

The big unanswered question about Pluto is, what does it even look like?

(Jason) With inside access to the New Horizons team

this is Pluto like you've never seen it before.

Nine and a half years in space

and it all comes down to one intense, nerve-wracking day.

It's showtime.

(theme music playing)

(Jason) Humans are movers.

We're a relentlessly restless species,

natural migrants, wanderers, adventurers, explorers.

Always have been.

We have this insatiable restlessness.

In the space of a few hundred thousand years,

we left Africa, crossed oceans, reached every part of our world.

And now?

Now we go to other worlds.

We've been to Mars, Jupiter, and Mercury.

We've seen Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, and Venus.

And Pluto is so much more than the name of a cartoon dog.

It's the last unexplored world of the solar system.

A potential goldmine of discovery.

Perhaps the key to understanding the origins of our own planet.

And right now,

NASA spacecraft New Horizons is about to open up that world to us

for the first time.

Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God.

(Jason) New Horizons has even made it to the world's favorite geek show.

I'm worried about the New Horizons space probe.

I get to see him flip out because he's worried

it was demolished by space ice.

Space ice is no joke.

I can't even watch Frozen anymore.

(Jason) We'll soon know if this audacious mission has succeeded.

The New Horizons team

is made up of some of the world's most elite space scientists.

Hal Weaver, project scientist.

To see the face of Pluto is gonna be astounding.

(Jason) Fran Bagenal, plasma and particles team.

We have only a very, very fuzzy glimpse of Pluto right now.

(Jason) Gabe Rogers, guidance team.

It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

(Jason) Amanda Zangari, geology and geophysics team.

I still don't believe it's real.

(Jason) Mission leader Alan Stern has devoted 26 years to this project.

(Alan)You can feel the energy in the team.

We're almost there to get what we did all this for.

(Jason) New Horizons blasted off on its epic voyage in 2006.

The same year that Twitter began.

It was the fastest manmade object ever to leave the Earth.

A year later,

it whizzed past Jupiter just as the first iPhone was launched.

The team used the opportunity

to test New Horizons' cameras on Jupiter and her moons,

grabbing some of the best pictures ever of a volcano erupting in space.

All through '08 and '09,

it sped silently through empty space

as the world descended into financial chaos.

On and on towards tiny Pluto over 3 billion miles away.

A 1,000 pound masterpiece of engineering the size of a grand piano,

hurtling through the outer solar system at ten times the speed of a bullet.

At 9 miles per second,

it's moving so fast that when it gets to Pluto, it can't land.

During encounter, it will attempt to swoop over the surface,

taking the critical photographs and measurements in less than two hours.

The encounter is so fleeting,

mission control must guide the spacecraft minute by minute...

This is the expected error bar from heaven.

(Jason) ...to put it exactly where it needs to be.

(Gabe)We're trying to basically figure out exactly

where the spacecraft is with respect to Pluto.

So, that's what we're doing right now um, up on the spacecraft.

(Jason) They're getting New Horizons to beam back pictures of Pluto

against the surrounding stars,

which they use to build the road map in space.

Just like the old sailors did back in the day with the sextant,

they knew where certain stars were at certain times of the day,

therefore they knew where they were on the planet.

Where Pluto is with respect to those stars,

we're able to determine where the spacecraft is

with respect to Pluto.

We're getting there, you know, almost a million miles a day,

so we're coming up on the planet fast.

(Jason) We should at last see what Pluto really looks like.

But until ten weeks ago, we had no idea,

even with the world's finest space telescope, Hubble.

I'm gonna show you the best images that we have of Pluto now.

Can you bring that up for a second?

And here you see the best images we've ever done of Pluto.

Just a pixelated mess.

Taken with the Hubble space telescope.

That's it from Hubble, the most powerful telescope we have?

You would love to see a more detailed picture,

all of us would,

but the problem is Pluto is just so far away.

(Jason) But even in this fuzzy blob, there are tantalizing clues,

if you look hard enough.

Analyzing it in different wavelengths of light

reveals traces of nitrogen, methane and carbon monoxide.

And because Pluto is so far from the sun,

it has to be one of the most frigid places in the solar system.

On Pluto, it's about negative 390 degrees Fahrenheit.

(Jason) Gases on Earth would freeze solid on Pluto.

Planetary scientist, Cathy Olkin,

imagines what it would be like to stand on Pluto.

If we were walking on Pluto,

you would see rocks and ice, but the ice would be very different.

It's not water ice like we see here.

It's nitrogen ice and carbon monoxide ice

and methane ice.

(Jason) But scientists also think

that where the weak sun hits the surface of Pluto,

some of the ice could get heated, turning directly into gas.

Pluto could be a mountainous world of exotic ice and primordial rock.

Gases spewing out of its surface.

It may look similar to how liquid nitrogen evaporates here.

(Cathy) On Pluto, I think the sunlight warms the ice

and that ice goes up into the atmosphere.

It's transported by winds to places on Pluto where it's colder...

and there it will condense, perhaps even forming clouds

and then you could be seeing snow or frost falling and condensing onto the surface.

So we believe that Pluto has weather.

(dramatic music playing)

(Jason) Hubble also reveals that Pluto has moons.

Its largest, named Charon, is half Pluto's size.

They both dance around each other

unlike any other planetary body in the solar system.

Understanding this might reveal how Pluto was formed

and that could tell us how the Earth was formed,

which is what led to you and me.

(Marc) We've got a real mystery on our hands

with this planet-moon system.

You have to wonder, how did it get there?

Pluto is a very primordial object.

It's been out in a deep freeze.

You can think of it as, uh, a storage area, your attic,

of some of the building blocks of our solar system.

Pluto is potentially a goldmine

for teaching us about the formation of even larger planets like the Earth.

(Jason) That's why they had to go to Pluto.

Sounds easy. Just go, right? Like, from here to there.

But going to Pluto meant reaching further than we've ever attempted before.

Over three and a half billion miles away,

25 times further than Mars.

And yet finally, after nine and a half years in space,

New Horizons has Pluto in its sights.

This is now the most dangerous phase of the mission.

Where a single grain of dust could take out the spacecraft.

If you've seen me on shows like Brain Games...

It just completely short circuits your brain.

...you'll know how much I get fired up by the wonders of the universe

and how the power of technology can reveal them.

Well, this is one of those moments in history

when all of those things come together in a single, exhilarating adventure.

If the New Horizons mission is successful,

it will be the climax of a story that goes back 85 years.

In 1930, American astronomer, Clyde Tombaugh,

took two photographs through a telescope, six days apart, of the night sky.

One of the dots moved. It had to be a planet.

It was named Pluto by a little girl in England

after the Roman God of the underworld.

Her grandfather was at Oxford,

and he passed on her suggestion to friends in the States.

And then movie mogul of the moment Walt Disney

picked up on America's new-found planetary star

and named his cartoon dog Pluto.

Pluto, how would you like them? Do you like them hot?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Not the other way around as a lot of people like me used to assume.

The public's love for the dog went on for decades

while poor little Pluto the Planet got sidelined.

Until Alan Stern came along.

You know, I grew up in the go-go time of space exploration.

I was a little bitty boy during the Apollo program.

(indistinct chatter on radio)

The technology of it, the scientific discoveries,

and frankly the romance of the exploration just swept me off my feet.

(indistinct chatter)

I got into the building model rockets that fly...

(cheering)

...and had a lot of fun with that for years.

(Jason) Alan watched the missions unfold year after year, planet after planet.

(Alan) Things were evolving so rapidly,

I didn't even know if I could get through school

in time to be a part of any of it

before we would explore the whole solar system.

(Jason) He needn't have worried, there was still Pluto,

the planet no one thought worth a mission because it was so small and so far away.

But in Alan's mind, they were saving the best for last.

Pluto is something that packs more scientific punch, I believe,

than any other planet in the solar system.

(Jason) And finally the kid who dreamed of joining the space race

landed his dream job.

(Alan) New Horizons is the capstone to that era of exploration.

It is, in a real sense, the last train to Clarksville.

The last Picture Show.

I don't think I would've believed it, ha, ha,

that I would be lucky enough to be in that position.

But standing here today,

for 15 years to pull this off, um, it's a wonderful feeling for us.

(Jason) Alan will soon discover

if his life's work has been worth the wait.

After nine and a half years in space,

New Horizons' mission to Pluto comes down to an encounter

lasting less than two hours

controlled by a team here on Earth over 3 billion miles away.

Pluto, 3.6 billion miles away.

Mind-bogglingly far.

How do you begin to get your head around that kind of distance?

Okay, so let's shrink the solar system down to the size of the US,

and imagine New York is the center.

Most New Yorkers already think that anyway.

Here's the sun, sitting on Manhattan.

At that scale, the first planet, Mercury, would be at Staten Island.

Venus is down the New Jersey turnpike and the Earth would be around Trenton.

To get to Pluto, New Horizons has had to cross the orbits of all the other planets.

Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.

And Pluto is right on the other side of the country in LA,

40 times further from the sun than the Earth is.

But that's only some of the time.

And that's because of the weird shape of Pluto's orbit.

See, if the sun is here and the Earth is here,

Pluto's orbit is kinda like that.

Right? It puts Pluto at 3 billion miles away at its closest...

but 5 billion miles at its farthest.

This elliptical orbit makes a big, big difference.

Pluto was at its closest point to us in 1989,

and since then it's been getting further away.

2015 is our final opportunity in a lifetime

to visit this last unexplored world.

An opportunity not to be missed.

The New Horizons mission was greenlit in 2001.

That gave them 14 years from greenlight to encounter with Pluto.

Sounds like plenty of time.

Not in the space business.

We had to launch New Horizons in one three-week launch window,

barely four years after winning the project.

(Jason) Four years to build a spacecraft, that normally takes up to ten,

required some creative solutions.

(Chris) We had a very short time to develop the spacecraft,

so a lot of the design had to be based on technology that was available.

You don't wanna be reinventing the wheel.

(Jason) The spacecraft had to meet exacting standards.

Above all, it had to be light.

So Chris and his team designed a lightweight triangular frame.

We cut the corners off of the spacecraft in order to reduce the mass.

We chose to avoid mechanisms

because mechanisms have a tendency to fail.

(Jason) It needed a reliable source of power.

So, what about solar energy?

Pluto is so far from the sun

that they get about 1,000 times less light than we get here on Earth.

To put that into perspective, when I put on a pair of sunglasses,

I reduce sunlight by a fraction.

To reduce sunlight to the level you'd have on Pluto,

you'd have to put on ten pairs of sunglasses.

No way you can power a spacecraft with that.

So New Horizons relies on a plutonium-powered generator,

which brings its own problems.

The power supply gives off some radiation, um, that could be bad for the electronics.

(Jason) So they had to keep the power supply really, really low.

(Chris) So, this little power source,

well, it produces about 200 watts of power at Pluto.

So, what does that mean, only 200 watts? Enough to power a fridge?

Nope. A coffee machine?

Not a chance.

Right now New Horizons is speeding through space,

running on just enough power to run a couple of these light bulbs.

The spacecraft doesn't even have enough power

to run an electric motor to point its radio antenna at Earth.

Instead, they have to rotate the entire spacecraft

to communicate with home.

So, to point its cameras and instruments at Pluto

will mean pointing the whole spacecraft away from Earth...

cutting off all contact with mission control.

We actually have to turn the spacecraft to take measurements at Pluto.

(Jason) New Horizons will be on its own during encounter.

If the flyby hits a problem, the team won't know until it's too late.

New Horizons is closing in on Pluto.

A one-shot attempt to gather as much data as possible of this unexplored world.

(Hal) After nine and a half years of hurtling through space,

we're approaching Pluto at 32,000 miles per hour,

and we're concentrating to get our highest resolution images

and spectra of the surface.

(Jason) With less than 100 days to go to closest approach,

New Horizons has returned these new images,

the best ever so far.

But these pale in comparison

with what they hope to get when they arrive.

Its seven instruments will probe Pluto's features

including its polar caps, atmosphere, and its weather.

Unlocking these secrets may help us understand

the processes Earth went through in its infancy.

A process that ultimately ended with you and me.

Gathering all this data isn't straightforward.

There isn't enough power to run all the instruments at once.

The team must program a flyby science sequence,

which tells New Horizons which instrument to turn on and when

and beam it to the spacecraft in advance.

Even travelling at light speed,

it takes four and a half hours for the signal to get there,

plus several days for New Horizons to process it.

We have to tell the spacecraft what to do days in advance.

We can't change New Horizons' plans

over a week before the encounter.

(Jason) With the flyby science sequence locked,

the climax of this mission comes down to timing.

Predicting the exact second New Horizons will fly past tiny Pluto.

Scientist Marc Buie shows just how difficult this is.

This car is New Horizons,

down in the distance you can see another car. That's Pluto.

And the whole idea is that we wanna take a picture

when we're absolutely as close as possible.

(Gabe) There's nothing on board the spacecraft that says I'm seeing something.

We sort of take the images in the blind.

(tense music playing)

You can say, "All right, spacecraft, turn,"

and hope Pluto's in the frame.

If you've got the right timing, it will be there.

If you don't have the right timing, it's not gonna be there.

(Jason) Marc closes his eyes and hopes for the best.

It's three...

two...

one.

And did we get it?

I missed it.

(Jason) The only way to predict where Pluto will be at encounter

is to know Pluto's orbit precisely.

But incredibly, when New Horizons left Earth nine and a half years ago...

the team lacked that critical information and here's why.

It takes Pluto 248 years to go around the sun once.

That's like in the whole history of the United States.

It's never been in the same place twice.

Since its discovery,

Pluto has only travelled a third of its orbit

and most of that data isn't very accurate.

This represents the sky.

The older data from 1930 to 1950 was less accurate.

1990, this is when we started taking really good data.

What that means is that you could draw another curve through here, say,

that might have a path that looks a little bit like this.

Each one of these lines here represents a different orbit.

(Jason) Each orbit puts Pluto in a different position at encounter.

Each one around 62,000 miles apart.

As late as 2012, two-thirds into the mission,

there is a chance New Horizons could miss Pluto completely.

(Marc) After all that time planning, building the spacecraft,

flying all the way across the solar system to take pictures of empty sky.

(Jason) Marc knows he has to find a solution and fast.

New Horizons has been in space nine and a half years.

They think they'll hit their target.

But there's no guarantee they'll succeed.

That's because in 2012,

with New Horizons speeding through space at almost a million miles a day.

Marc Buie realizes he doesn't know exactly where Pluto will be at encounter.

(tense music playing)

I just finally got to the point where in a science team meeting,

I stood up and said, "This is a problem."

(Jason) With the entire mission in jeopardy,

Marc visits the Lowell Observatory...

where Tombaugh first discovered Pluto.

And incredibly, he stumbles upon a stockpile of telescope images

of the night sky around Pluto.

Taken by astronomer Carl Lampland.

Photographed between 1930 and the early '50s.

(Marc) Here on the left, we've got one of the two plates

that Tombaugh used to actually discover Pluto.

But that's not enough to pin down the orbit.

Then comes the Lampland plates,

zooming in, higher magnification, higher precision,

but more importantly,

over 20 years of time with nearly 1,000 measurements.

Who knows what he was trying to do,

but clearly, measuring the position of Pluto was one of those things.

(Jason) Processing nearly a thousand of Lampland's images

Marc creates the first ever movie of Pluto's orbit.

Just visible as a tiny, faint dot moving to the right of the bright star.

Yep, that little tiny dot is Pluto.

Incredibly, by tracking the dot precisely,

Marc's team can steer New Horizons towards it

to within 8,000 miles of its surface.

He can now also predict exactly where Pluto will be

on July 14, 2015, at the moment of encounter.

I think there's just such an amazing story,

but the data that Carl Lampland took

has been phenomenally important for the mission.

(Jason) With New Horizons on track, the mission suffers an unexpected blow.

The world's most elusive planet

suddenly becomes the world's most contentious.

And finally it is official now. Pluto is no longer a planet.

The International Astronomical Union voted it out of the planet business...

(crowd) Pluto is a planet, size doesn't matter.

I talked with a student just last week

who thought that this meant that Pluto was kicked out of the solar system,

had been ejected.

- It's too small. - Once a planet, always a planet.

Of course, it's not. It's still in its orbit,

going the way it was before.

It's just been reclassified.

The word planet is strictly defined to be a body rounded...

(Jason) In fact, Pluto had been officially demoted

by the International Astronomical Union.

Those in favor of resolution one.

Those opposed.

Pluto forever!

(Jason) The public was outraged.

School kids inundated TV scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson with protest letters.

"Dear, Mr. Tyson, why do you think Pluto is no longer a planet?

I do not like your answer.

(chuckles)

You are going to have to take all of the books away and change them.

That's from Emerson", aged nine.

In America's most popular television show The Big Bang Theory,

the writers tapped into this rich vein of popular discontent.

...Hayden Planetarium in New York.

I'm quite familiar with Dr. Tyson.

He's responsible for the demotion of Pluto from planetary status.

I liked Pluto.

Ergo, I do not like you.

But I actually didn't demote Pluto,

that was a vote of the International Astronomical Union.

If ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we'd all have a merry Christmas.

Think about that, Dr. Tyson.

So, what's the problem with Pluto?

Why isn't it a planet?

What exactly is a planet?

It's gotta be round, right?

(upbeat music playing)

The body needs to be round because of its size or its self-gravity.

Big enough to pull itself together,

have enough gravity, have enough mass to make it round.

Otherwise, it really is just a chunk.

It makes sense. Presumably it goes around the sun, right?

A planet is an object that orbits the sun.

Got it. Anything else?

There's primary planets, so the Earth, Jupiter, and Pluto.

Then there are secondary planets.

The moon is a secondary planet because it orbits a primary planet.

And you could have tertiary planets,

terrestrial planets, gas planets, icy planets...

Stop, stop, stop.

All right, guys, most of the scientists seem to think Pluto's a planet,

so, what's up?

It seems it wasn't Pluto itself that was the problem.

But that Pluto was no longer alone.

Astronomers had found another tiny object out near Pluto.

Then others and yet more.

Over 1,000 planet-like objects, some as big as Pluto.

They called this new region the Kuiper Belt...

a massive constellation of space rocks and ice orbiting the sun.

You see, when they discovered the Kuiper Belt,

there were potentially thousands of new Pluto-sized planets.

And they'd all need names.

Their reaction was, "Well, we can't have too many planets

because school children will never remember the names of them."

Really?

I thought to myself, "Do we have to limit the number of stars while we're at it?"

(indistinct dialogue)

It will be disastrous for astronomy

if we come away from the general assembly with nothing.

We will be regarded as complete idiots.

(Jason) They decided to call the biggest objects in this Kuiper Belt dwarf planets

and that included Pluto.

So, now we have Pluto and the 7,000 dwarves.

The thing about planets is that it's not their size that matters,

but what they can tell us about our origins.

And the Kuiper Belt discovery

only made New Horizons' mission to Pluto more important.

These rocks are the relics

left over from the formation of the solar system.

And they may help us to understand how planets form, including our Earth.

(Hal) Pluto is a fossil.

It's really gonna help us to understand exactly what was going on

during those early years when the Earth was forming

and all of the other planets.

(Jason) But getting close to all this stuff poses a big problem.

There could be debris floating around that could destroy the spacecraft.

The New Horizons team is guiding the spacecraft

towards Pluto and its moons in the final stage

of this historic flyby attempt.

We're on the brink of profound discoveries about Pluto

and what it could tell us about our origins.

If successful, New Horizons could revolutionize our understanding

of how our own planet formed.

The latest images from New Horizons reveal the hazards

that could be lying in its path.

Seen here, Pluto is surrounded by its five moons,

Charon and four smaller objects.

Analysis suggests these small objects aren't round

but misshapen chunks of rock...

tumbling erratically in orbits around Pluto.

The team believes that Charon and the smaller moons

could be leftover from collisions early in Pluto's history.

We think that they share the same origins,

that there was some kind of a giant impact early in their history.

Two objects collide and leave two bodies orbiting each other.

(tense music playing)

(Jason) If New Horizons can get close enough to study these objects,

they might prove how Pluto and its collection of moons formed.

And that could help explain how our own Earth and moon formed.

Kevin Walsh thinks that modern ballistics can explain what they think happened.

The first requirement is high speed.

The speed of a bullet.

(gunshot)

The target is Pluto. The bullet is a giant space rock.

(Kevin) When the bullet leaves the muzzle,

it's travelling at about a kilometer per second.

It's actually built a moon and would have involved an impact

between those two bodies about the same velocity.

(gunshot)

(Jason) New Horizons team think that big pieces of rock impacted Pluto

billions of years ago,

bounced off and got caught in Pluto's gravity,

creating its moons.

(Kevin) If it hit just the right angle,

it'll slow down that impactor enough that it can remain bound around Pluto

and you can form a moon then around Pluto because you've captured that impactor.

(Jason) If this is how Pluto and its moons were formed,

the evidence should be written on their surfaces.

But getting New Horizons close enough to see this is extremely hazardous.

(gunshots)

Any collision at a kilometer per second or faster

is not gonna be clean, it's gonna be really dirty.

There's gonna be a lot of debris thrown everywhere.

(Jason) Clouds of ancient shrapnel

could be lying right in New Horizons' path.

Even though it's orbiting at a really low velocity,

the spacecraft itself will be coming in at a very high velocity.

(gunshot)

Ten times the speed of a bullet leaving this gun.

(Jason) And it won't take much to destroy the spacecraft.

If New Horizons is impacted by something this size,

it could pass through the spacecraft.

(Alan) And once it does, it's quite likely to cut a fuel line

or get into the main computer and hurt a circuit board

or damage a scientific instrument.

If we fly through shrapnel like that,

uh, it'll be bad for New Horizons. It could be catastrophic.

(Jason) The team need to guide New Horizons

close enough to Pluto and its moons to study them...

while keeping a safe distance from debris and shrapnel.

Speeding towards Pluto at a million miles a day...

there is little time left to correct its course.

(Gabe) Once we're past that last trajectory control maneuver,

we really can't do anything,

we just have to hope that space is very big

and we're very small and we just don't run into anything.

You cross your fingers and hope.

(Jason) Nine and a half years in space,

journeying over 3 billion miles...

right now this $700 million spacecraft is on the cusp of revealing

the most detailed images of Pluto ever taken.

The New Horizons team is downloading the latest images from the spacecraft.

This is their first proper look at the landscape

they will fly over during closest approach.

Analysis suggests there are polar caps,

perhaps a mountain range

and there could even be evidence of an impact crater.

But for the ultimate proof of Pluto, they must wait just a little longer.

(tense music playing)

(Alan) We're almost there to get what we did all this for.

We're on the heels of discovery.

(Jason) The final sequence has been sent to the spacecraft.

It's locked and loaded.

(Gabe) It's very tense.

The scientists are very excited, the planning teams are very anxious.

We've got one shot to get this right and we've never done this before.

(Alan) You can feel the energy in the team.

When you put that much time and effort into a project,

you're pretty excited when you're on Pluto's doorstep.

(Jason) Guiding New Horizons between Pluto and its moons,

small pieces of shrapnel

could be the only thing that now stands in their way.

With the spacecraft flying towards them at over 30,000 miles per hour.

Even a one millimeter particle will blow a hole,

blast a hole through the spacecraft.

There's basically no good place to hit New Horizons.

(Jason) But Hal Weaver believes they might have come up with a solution...

using the radio antenna as a shield.

(Hal) The benefit of having this large dish antenna

pointing in this direction,

this is the direction of the spacecraft's motion.

So the particles will hit the antenna at the front here

without really hurting the function of the antenna,

but protecting what's underneath.

(Jason) With the antenna absorbing the energy of any impact,

it should survive.

All they can do now is wait for news of the fly-past.

(indistinct conversation)

On July 14th at 03:15 Universal Time,

New Horizons starts its programed maneuvers.

Operating on its own, it turns away from Earth and towards Pluto.

Cutting all communications with mission control.

Then New Horizons' onboard computer focuses on gathering the core science.

It begins scanning, sampling and photographing this alien place.

It's at its closest to Pluto at 11:50,

less than 8,000 miles from its surface.

A life's work, a $700 million spacecraft,

nine and a half years in space.

Success rests on a fleeting encounter

with the last unexplored world of the solar system.

If New Horizons succeeds,

it will stream its data back to Earth,

revealing Pluto's secrets for the very first time.

The long wait for answers is almost over.

(Hal) When we get that data that tells us everything is cool...

it'll just be jubilation.

It's like opening night at a Broadway play. It's showtime!

(siren wailing)

When that data comes back,

one of the most incredible journeys in the history of human exploration

will be complete.

From the Earth to the last planet in the solar system,

3.6 billion miles.

It's been 85 years since Clyde Tombaugh

first spotted that tiny elusive dot in his telescope.

Clyde never lived to see New Horizons lift off.

But his ashes are on that spacecraft as it flies past Pluto.

You gotta love the sentiment of that.

To send a man to meet his own discovery and what a discovery!

(dramatic music playing)

For the nine years, nine and a half years, that New Horizons has been on its way,

we've been wondering what is Pluto like.

And we're gonna finally see it. We're finally gonna get those pictures.

(Jason) They could reveal what it's like to stand on Pluto's surface

or experience its weather.

I'm gonna be excited no matter what we find on Pluto.

(Jason) Pluto might even shed light on the origins of our own planet

and possibly the entire solar system.

Now at last we're about to find out.

(Alan) When we started, the question that we posed to everybody was,

"What would we find there?"

There were many detailed scientific predictions.

Mine was a little different.

It just says that we'll find something wonderful.

(theme music playing)