New Horizons

I was fascinated by reports over Christmas featuring NASA's New Horizons probe.

In case you missed it, this is a spaceprobe which was launched back in 2006, and has been travelling to the outer parts of the solar system at 32,000mph for the last thirteen years, collecting various bits of information along the way. It was last in the news when it visited Pluto three and a half years ago, sending pictures of snowfalls and ice mountains on the dwarf planet’s surface and providing more information about Pluto than had ever been available before.

This time, New Horizons was visiting a much smaller object, one which I confess I hadn’t heard. Ultima Thule, a name chosen from classical mythology which meaning beyond the borders of the known world, is a small frozen, rocky object located in a region called the Kuiper belt, about as far past Pluto as Saturn is from us. Objects in that part of the solar system are essentially fragments of the material that originally made up the solar system when it was formed from a huge cloud of gas particles 4.5 billion years ago. Pictures of Ultima Thule are not only pictures of an object a long way away, they are also pictures of a long time ago.

So what, you may say? What is so special about a small rock billions of miles away from us? And to some extent, it’s a fair question. Space missions do not come cheap. The total cost of the New Horizons probe was about $700 million dollars, or about £500 million pounds. This is actually small beans compared to the cost of the Apollo missions, which put man on the moon almost exactly 40 years ago; they cost something of the order of £25 billion dollars back in the 60s and 70s, which be the equivalent to the total wealth of a small country. How can spending this kind of money be justified when at the same time there are so many American citizens who are homeless or unable to feed their families? Surely that kind of money could be better spent.

And yet, there is something undeniably exciting about finding out about our early origins. The history of human civilisation has been one of constantly asking questions about ourselves and our surroundings. One of those questions has always been where have we come from and how did we get here. It’s entirely understandable that we want some answers and developments in technology over the last 50 to 100 years have allowed us to get some answers to those questions.

There is something about space investigation, and ultimately space travel, which is even more fundamental than that. The mountaineer George Mallory, who died on his attempt to climb Mount Everest in 1924, was once asked why he was so desperate to climb the mountain. “Because it’s there,” he famously replied. Space is just there. When the weather is good, we see it for about 16 hours a day if we lift our eyes above the horizon. Some of you will live in places away from cities and light pollution where you can see the thousands if not billions of stars in our galaxy. It is literally a wonderful sight, and I am sure we have all speculated about life beyond the planet. That natural curiosity is ingrained in us, and I feel lucky to live at a time where the answers to some of those fundamental questions are within reach.