At
Witty International School we inspire all of our students to continuous
inquiry, empowering them with the skills, courage, optimism, and integrity to
pursue their dreams and enhance the lives of others. In keeping up with this
philosophy WIS recently organized a seminar for the students on “NASA’s New
Horizons Mission to Pluto and Beyond.” To enrich the students on this the
school had invited an esteemed Planetary Scientist, Dr. Henry Throop. Throop is
a Senior Scientist with the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona,
USA. His work focuses on the outer solar system, and he has published over 40
articles in scientific journals, on topics ranging from torings of Saturn and
Jupiter, to planet and star formation, to astrobiology and the origins of life,
to searching for (and co-discovering) Pluto's smallest moon, Styx, in 2012. He
is a frequent consultant to the US's NASA and the National Science
Foundation. While working at NASA, he
was responsible for the oversight and management of two of the NASA's major
scientific research programs. Throop has been a member of the science team for
NASA’s New Horizons mission since 2003, and was involved in its historic flyby
of Pluto on July 14, 2015.Throop’s work has been featured in Science, Nature,
Time, The Washington Post, and on the History Channel and National Geographic
TV.
After
a nine-year journey though space, astronomers visited Pluto for the first time
in July 2015, using a robotic NASA spacecraft called New Horizons. Despite
being a cold and small icy body, New Horizons found Pluto’s surface to be
young, dynamic, and varied. Planetary Scientist Dr. Henry Throop told the story
of this NASA spacecraft mission, from its development and construction, through
launch in 2006, to its successful encounter with Pluto, and its plans for
onward encounters with bodies in the distant Kuiper Belt.
New
Horizons is an interplanetary space probe launched as part of NASA’s New
Frontiers program to study Pluto, its moons and the Kuiper belt (just
outside our solar system). Pluto is the now classified ‘dwarf planet’ at the
end of our solar system, around 6-7.5 billion kilometers away and when New
Horizons reached it in July 2015, it had been travelling for 11 years to get
there.
For quite a long
time dreams of interstellar travel and exploring the final frontier have run
rampant in the minds of children and scientists alike, and with some of the
latest breakthroughs in technology and research NASA scientists have laid out goals to achieve manned flight to the
edge of our Solar System in 50 years Pluto has proven to be much different from the
predictions also. Due to its distance from the sun, probable composition and
location it was expected to be cold, boring and covered in craters from
collisions. However, it’s proving to be very interesting with heart shaped
fields of nitrogen ice and 3500 meter high ice clouds of water. It is also
surprisingly warm for an object so far from the sun!
Dr.
Henry Throop started by speaking to the students about Pluto’s discovery in
1930 by Clyde Tombaugh studying photographs of the night sky. Constellations
stay in the same place but planets move and using this he was also able to see
a spot in the images that changed over time and so Pluto was revealed. The New
Horizons initiative along with the collaboration of NASA, U.S.A sent a space
craft to find more about the not so revealed secrets of Pluto and it took 9
years to finally get the true images of Pluto. Dr. Throop was involved with the
calibration of instruments on board New Horizons, including the infrared
spectrometer, which measures energy that is given off in the infrared
wavelength. Since launch, he has been involved with planning observations,
specifically those looking for new moons or rings of Pluto. Dr. Throop , an
advocate for increasing the public's awareness in the society stated, “I think
it’s really important that we, as scientists, don’t sort of keep all that stuff
for ourselves. A, that’s greedy, B, it’s boring, and C, it doesn’t help out the
rest of the world if we just keep it to ourselves. We have a responsibility to
talk to the public and show them how cool it is that we are able to explore the
world around us and explain it better than we could a decade ago, or twenty
years ago, or a hundred years ago." Dr. Throop offered inspirational
advice to Wittians, “Just do what you want to do. Do what you’re going to enjoy
most: something that makes you happy and fulfills your curiosity… Work on neat,
cool projects that interest you and interest other people.”
Throop
stated that New Horizons' future looks bright. In the next couple of years, the
team will choose one or more Kuiper belt objects to travel to, assuming that
NASA funds and approves their plan.
Kuiper belt objects are small, icy bodies beyond Pluto, similar to Pluto
but a little smaller and further out. Following the talk our students got the
chance to ask probing questions to Dr Throop about Pluto and the mission. Dr
Throop also spoke about his inspiration for pursuing science from his Physics
teacher at school. This inspiration and the fact that he found Astrophysics
easy and fun meant he wanted to go further and make this as his career.
Mr.
Bijo Kurian, the Principal of Witty International School, Pawan Baug quoted, “
Astronomy compels the soul to look upward, and leads us from this world to
another, to explore strange new world
and to boldly go where no man has gone before & hence students of today
need to be engaged in these thought process.” Following the seminar Dr. Throop
also launched the state of the art Science Lab- “Curiocity” at Witty
International School, Pawan Baug.The exhilaration amongst the students instilled a sense of better understanding and
enhanced the scientific curiosity among the students.
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