I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.

- Thomas Edison

Well, I did my best to sneak into the pages of 48 Hour Magazine — a “raucous experiment in using new tools to erase media’s old limits.”

Unfortunately my 430ish words didn’t make the final cut for their “issue zero,” which was themed around the word hustle.

Alexis Madrigal of WIRED tells me that my piece made it far, in fact sailing into the second round. But there it met demise in the face of stiff competition.

Low on battery power, high on hopes, and swimming in motion sickness, I gave it everything I could while crammed into a Ford Escort during a 20-hour road trip to Florida. And regardless of the circumstances, I still think it’s a pretty neat piece. (See below.)

But please don’t mistake my words for whining; that makes for poor company, and even poorer blogging!

This was a hell of a lot of fun, I learned a lot, and I’m extremely thrilled that I even had the opportunity to try, follow through with a submission, and make it as far as I did in the selection process.

I’ll rest peacefully tonight knowing that 48 Hour Magazine appears to be a shining, glorious, smashing success — congrats to all of you guys and gals, contributors included — and that there will always be next time.

That said, here’s my submission:

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Gambling on a little science from Pluto

By Dave Mosher

If you want to meet Pluto head-on before you wither away and die, you’ve gotta hustle. The mysterious icy world is roughly 3 billion miles away.

Thankfully, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is already in the midst of a speedy interplanetary road trip toward the edge of the solar system.

NASA hurled New Horizons through space at more than 36,000 mph in early 2006, making it the fastest man-made object ever launched. This year the plucky probe passed the halfway point at 1.48 billion miles – equivalent to 120,000 trips around the Earth’s equator.

“How did we become the fastest? We built a small spacecraft, about the size of a piano, and put it on the biggest launch vehicle anyone would sell us,” said Alan Stern, a space scientist at Southwest Research Institute and leader of the New Horizons mission.

The vessel: A 20-story-tall Atlas V rocket.

“An Atlas V payload is big enough for a moving van, but we only launched with one piece of furniture,” Stern told 48 Hour Magazine. “We basically launched the thing empty for maximum speed.”

When it arrives at Pluto in about 5 years, it will unpack its figurative bag of instruments and perform a choreographed sequence of observations. Its tasks include hunting for miniscule moons, spying cryo-volcanoes on the surface, and looking for traces of a tenuous atmosphere.

One year after launch, scientists gave New Horizons an in-flight dress rehearsal at Jupiter. There the spacecraft snapped extreme close-ups of Jupiter’s “Little Red Spot,” spied lightning storms and aurora on the giant planet, and captured the first-ever video of volcanoes on sulfur-stained Io – one of Jupiter’s many moons.

Another 5 years until the big show at Pluto may seem painfully long, but Stern noted that if New Horizons were going significantly faster, it wouldn’t get to see much of anything at all.

“Hustling to your destination is a Catch-22,” he said. “If you go by too quickly, you can’t collect data or slow down enough to drop into orbit.”

New Horizons won’t orbit Pluto – that might require another Atlas V rocket to slow it down enough for Pluto’s weak gravity to snag the spacecraft. But it will drift by slowly enough to scope out Pluto and its three moons, Charon, Hydra and Nix.

Or so mission scientists hope.

“Launching any spacecraft is a gamble. It might not work,” Stern said. “In this case, it’s a 10-year journey with no repairman along the way.”

Despite the risks, Stern is feeling optimistic.

“I’m helping fly the first mission to the farthest planet,” he said. “I feel like the luckiest guy on Earth.”

Originally submitted to 48 Hour Magazine’s “Hustle” edition (issue zero). All rights reserved by Dave Mosher.
To reuse this article, either partially or wholly, please contact Dave. He’ll be thrilled to see this published anywhere other than his blog. Even if you make fun of him.

Photo courtesy of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Tags: 48 hour magazine, failure, new horizons, pluto, writing

Posted Sunday, May 9th, 2010 at 6:55 pm. Filed under Experimentation, Science Writing, Space and Astronomy. Follow responses to this post through the feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.