The slow Pluto science drip

Last week The Los Angeles Times had a write up about the new Pluto mission, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft zooms in on Pluto. This has been many years in coming, as the spacecraft launched in 2006. The “flyby” is going to occur in July of this year, when spacecraft whizzes by the planet. But the first photos are now being taken. Unfortunately it’s going to take a long long time to analyze and process the data. For the details, see Emily Lakadwalla’s post. Cassini-Huygens is still ongoing, but the excitement of New Horizons is that Pluto is very much virgin territory, rather like the original Voyager missions to the outer solar system.

I know it’s in vogue to talk about all the lack of progress in our current epoch (see: Peter Thiel). And to some extent I think there’s something to this critique of the age. But it also speaks to how far we’ve come in terms of our velocity that there hasn’t been much press coverage of these planetary missions. They’re now “normal science.”