New Horizons changes our view of Pluto

The way we look at the solar system is about to change and it’s all because of a spacecraft with strong Colorado ties.

It’s vacation season and many people are traveling. Some of them are making their way to the Space Foundation Visitor Center in Colorado Springs.

“A friend of ours came a couple of weeks ago and gave us a pamphlet, so we thought we’d check it out. It had some interesting things to do,” said Kendall Gatton, a visitor from Iowa.

Gatton and his family traveled about 850 miles.

But their trip is nothing like the one that the New Horizons spacecraft has taken.

“The New Horizons spacecraft does a flyby of Pluto (Tuesday) morning,” said Jami Sunkel of the Space Foundation.

New Horizons has gone about three and a half million times as far as the Gattons, and it’s discovered some interesting things too.

“These are the closest images of Pluto that we’ll ever have,” said Sunkel.

What we’ll see will change our view of Pluto.

Before a few weeks ago, the only images of Pluto were fuzzy images from the Hubble Space Telescope.

But in the next 85 hours, we’re going to discover more about Pluto than we’ve known in the last 85 years.

A long time coming – but not fast enough for one budding scientist.

Gavin Brown said, “I’d like to get to another star system faster.”

New Horizons will answer a lot of questions about Pluto.

“Textbooks are going to be rewritten after tomorrow,” said Sunkel.

But it will raise many more.

“There’s still a lot more stuff that we don’t know about it,” said Brown.

It’s up to that next generation to figure it all out.

New Horizons will arrive at Pluto Tuesday morning, but because it’s so far away it will take more than four hours for the images to reach Earth.

A number of the components for the spacecraft were built in Colorado.