Dr Henry Throop, a member of NASA's mission to the dwarf planet, on how the distant planet is far from being 'a dead rock'
Dr Henry Throop
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After three years of living amid the hustle and bustle of Mumbai - of which he says he loved every second - it is finally time for senior scientist Dr Henry Throop to bid farewell to the city, as he prepares to move to the United States.
On Saturday Throop was giving a talk on behalf of Space Geeks Mumbai, a group of young researchers committed to spreading the love of astronomy. The subject of the talk was a robotic spacecraft, New Horizons, which fulfilled NASA's nine-year-long mission to reach the planet Pluto. Throop, who is with the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, was a member of the team that created New Horizons.
On July 14, 2015, the spacecraft flew by Pluto, after which it transmitted high-res digital images back to NASA. This was the first time humanity was seeing the solar system's most distant planet - up close and personal. "After 9.5 years and travelling 6 billion km through space, the spacecraft finally flew by Pluto - one minute earlier than we had predicted. It is beyond Pluto now and is heading out of the solar system, into the Kuiper Belt, which it will leave by 2100, and then head deeper into space until it finally runs out of fuel," he said.
According to him, the most surprising thing about Pluto was that it was nothing like anything the team's scientists had anticipated. "We thought the planet would be like a dead rock but what we found was that the surface was changing and active geology was taking place. The planet's surface is millions of years - not billions -which makes it considerably a lot more younger than other planets. Even the number of impact craters on the surface of Pluto are much lesser."
Throop's primarily role on the Mission horizon spacecraft was to work on the craft's calibration and design. Now, as he is expected to move with his family to Washington DC sometime after July, Throop says that he will always carry aamchi Mumbai with him in his heart.
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