With us now is Dr. Hal Weaver, a project scientist for New Horizons. Hal, it's a pleasure to have you here with us today.
Thanks, it's great to be here. Would you please explain to our viewers what your responsibilities and involvement are with this mission?
Yeah, I'm the project scientist on the Horizons mission and I'm the main interface between the science community and the engineering community.
I work at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab which built the spacecraft, and we have to make sure that the scientific objectives
that we want to accomplish on the New Horizons mission get implemented by the engineers. And so that was my main role, is to
make sure that over the course of time, when we have design changes that have to be made because you can't do something exactly
the way that you thought you could, that we don't compromise the scientific objectives.
Our viewers have submitted some though-provoking questions about the New Horizons mission, so let's get started.
Sounds good.
Our first question comes from Colleen from Long Island: Will New Horizons find ice geysers and ice plumes that fill Pluto's atmosphere,
like on Neptune's moon, Triton?
I love this question because it really forces us to think about this mission from a broader perspective. Sure, it's about Pluto.
Pluto is our prime target. But we also want to know how Pluto fits in relative to all the other objects in the solar system.
And it turns out this person, Colleen, has really done her homework here, because Triton is probably the best analogue of Pluto in the
solar system that we know of right now. And we just got a faint glimpse of Triton back in 1979, when one of the Voyager spacecraft
got to fly back and flew by Neptune -- and Triton is a moon of Neptune -- and they took some, some really fascinating pictures of Triton
showing these cryogenic geysers. It's like Old Faithful, except instead of being hot steam coming out, it's frozen nitrogen gas.
And we think that we probably see similar things on Pluto.
It sounds like Colleen might be a future scientist, maybe?
Yeah, could be.