See other posts from July 2013

Remembering the Pluto Campaign: A Success Story

The Society Worked for Years to Help Launch a Mission to Pluto

Posted by Casey Dreier

2013/07/22 02:11 CDT

Topics: best of, history, Planetary Society Political Advocacy, Planetary Society History, Charon, Pluto, dwarf planets beyond Neptune, New Horizons

There's a fascinating Pluto conference going on this week at the Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. Our Planetary Evangelist/Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla will be there to cover all the great Pluto-system science that is happening (and will happen!) thanks to the New Horizons spacecraft that will fly by Pluto in 2015 (you can also follow the hashtag #PlutoSci on Twitter).

This seemed like a good excuse to dig through the archives and restore some content from our old website. So go ahead and check out our Pluto Project page to see just how much damn work the Society did to help make this mission a reality.

It's a good reminder that we can't take exploration for granted. It doesn't just happen. It took years to get a mission to Pluto to the launchpad, requiring active political advocacy and and tens of thousands of letters of support by Planetary Society members. Our CEO, Bill Nye, has fond memories of delivering wheelbarrows full of messages to Congressional offices in the early 2000s.

As we read Emily's reports of the great science coming our way from New Horizons and ready ourselves for the truly spectacular images that will be delivered of Pluto's surface, remember that it was because we all worked together to make it happen.

Ed Hengeveld / Philip Corneille

New Horizons at Pluto and Charon