I keep doing the math over and over like it's going to change. New Horizons launched in January 2006 (back when Pluto was still officially a planet, for about six more months anyway), and tomorrow morning, a little before 8am Eastern, it's going to scream past Pluto at something like 30,800 miles an hour, missing the surface by about 7,750 miles. That's closer, relatively speaking, than a lot of flights I've taken pass their layover city. Nine and a half years of flying through basically nothing to get one close look at a little world we still don't have a decent picture of.
And here's the part that's messing with me tonight: during the actual flyby, we won't hear anything. The spacecraft can't point its instruments at Pluto and its antenna at Earth at the same time, so it goes dark on purpose. All that data just sits on board while the whole internet waits. The "phone home" signal isn't expected until tomorrow evening, and until then it's just silence and a whole lot of people, myself included, refreshing NASA TV for no reason.
I don't know why this particular mission has gotten under my skin the way it has. I've watched rocket launches on a laptop at 2am before and mostly just felt tired the next day. This feels different. Maybe it's the timescale — I was in my twenties when this thing launched, doing something I don't even remember now, and it's been quietly crossing the solar system this whole time while I've had like four different jobs and two different apartments. There's something almost embarrassing about how much closer I feel to a piece of hardware than to some people I went to college with.
The image NASA put out last week, the one everyone's calling the "heart" (it's officially Tombaugh Regio, named for the guy who discovered Pluto in 1930, which is a nice touch), is honestly better than I expected going in. I had this vague assumption we'd get a blurry gray blob and a press conference about how blurry gray blobs are actually scientifically exciting. Instead you can see actual terrain. Ridges. Something that looks almost like frost patterns. It's a real place now instead of a dot with an orbit.
Small complaint, and I'll keep it short: I wish there were a better way to watch this stuff live than piecing together a NASA TV stream, a Twitter list, and a browser tab that keeps trying to autoplay video I didn't ask for. Every big space event it's the same scramble. You'd think by 2015 there'd be one clean feed instead of four mediocre ones.
Anyway. I'm setting an alarm for tomorrow morning, which is a strange sentence to type about a dwarf planet three billion miles away, but here we are. I know the actual "wow" images probably won't show up until later in the week once they've had time to downlink and process everything, since the flyby itself happens too fast and the bandwidth is too thin for an instant photo dump. So really what I'm setting an alarm for is a closest-approach timestamp and a lot of nervous scientists on a livestream, not fireworks. That's fine. I'd still rather watch nine years of patience pay off in real time than read about it after the fact with my coffee already cold.
If you'd told nineteen-year-old me that "the day we finally see Pluto up close" would be a Tuesday I'd spend half-distracted at a desk, checking a countdown timer between emails, I don't think I'd have believed how normal it would feel. But that's kind of always how it goes with the big stuff. It sneaks in around your actual schedule instead of replacing it.
More once we've actually got the pictures. For now I'm just watching the clock.