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A chapter in the final, no, frontier
WASHINGTON – We need a pick-me-up. Amid the vandalizing of Palmyra, the imminent extinction of the northern white rhino, the disarray threatening Europe’s most ambitious attempt ever at peaceful unification – amid plague and pestilence and, by God, in the middle of Shark Week – where can humanity turn for uplift?
Meet New Horizons, arriving at Pluto on Tuesday. Small and light, the fastest spacecraft ever launched, it left Earth with such velocity that it shot past our moon in nine hours. It has flown 9 1/2 years to the outer edges of the solar system.
To Pluto, the now-demoted “dwarf planet” that lives beyond the Original Eight in the far distant “third zone” of the solar system – the Kuiper Belt, an unimaginably huge ring of rocks and ice and sundry debris where the dwarf is king.