WEBVTT

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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.

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Thanks, it's great to be here. Would you please explain to our viewers what your responsibilities and
involvement are with this mission?

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Yeah, I'm the project scientist on the Horizons mission and I'm the main interface between the science
community and the engineering community.

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I work at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab which built the spacecraft, and we have to make sure that the scientific objectives

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that we want to accomplish on the New Horizons mission get implemented by the engineers. And so that was my main role, is to

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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

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the way that you thought you could, that we don't compromise the scientific objectives.

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Our viewers have submitted some though-provoking questions about the New Horizons mission, so let's get started.

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Sounds good.

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Our first question comes from Colleen from Long Island: Will New Horizons find ice geysers and ice plumes that fill Pluto's atmosphere,

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like on Neptune's moon, Triton?

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I love this question because it really forces us to think about this mission from a broader perspective.  Sure, it's about Pluto.

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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.

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And it turns out this person, Colleen, has really done her homework here, because Triton is probably the best analogue of Pluto in the

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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

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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

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showing these cryogenic geysers.  It's like Old Faithful, except instead of being hot steam coming out, it's frozen nitrogen gas.

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And we think that we probably see similar things on Pluto.

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It sounds like Colleen might be a future scientist, maybe?

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Yeah, could be.

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