Science Friday - American Eden, New Horizons To Ultima Thule. Dec 28, 2018, Part 2

Episode Date: December 28, 2018

Every holiday season, tourists throng Rockefeller Center to see the famous tree, soaring above the paved plazas and fountains. But more than 200 years ago, they would have found avocado and fig trees there, along with kumquats, cotton, and wheat—all specimens belonging to the Elgin Botanic Garden, founded by physician and botanist David Hosack. Hosack grew up in the shadow of the American Revolution and became fascinated with the healing powers of plants as a young doctor studying abroad. Upon returning to the young United States, he founded America's very first botanical garden, in the model of the great European gardens, as a place where he could study crops and medicinal plants. He was close friends with both Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr (he was the attending physician at their fatal duel) and went on to help found many of New York City's civic institutions, such as Bellevue Hospital and the New York Historical Society, along with the first obstetrics hospital, mental hospital, school for the deaf, and natural history museum. "Hosack started with his garden, and ended with making New York New York," says Victoria Johnson. She tells the story of Hosack's life in her book American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic. Yet Hosack has been largely forgotten by history, overshadowed by names like Rockefeller and Carnegie, even though he was legendary in the generations after his death. In this segment, Ira braves the crowds of Rockefeller Center on a hunt for Hosack's commemorative plaque, and interviews Johnson for the unheard story of this forgotten revolutionary hero. What are your resolutions for 2019? If the answer is “explore a frozen, primitive planet-like body,” you have something in common with New Horizons, the spacecraft that dazzled the world with close-ups of Pluto in 2015. Its next stop? The first fly-by of an object in the distant Kuiper Belt. New Horizons has been flying further away from us in the years since, and will soon encounter Ultima Thule, a small object about the size of New York City that may be able to tell us more about the origins of our solar system. Ultima Thule is thought to have been frozen and undisturbed for more than 4.6 billion years—a potentially perfect time capsule of the solar nebula that gave rise to Earth and its neighbors. Ira talks to Alan Stern, principal investigator of the New Horizons mission, about the New Year’s Eve fly-by and the treasure trove of data his team is hoping to unwrap. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

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On Myra Flato, this is Science Friday. We're outside at the famed Rockefeller Center in Midtown, New York. It is a mecca for tourists searching for bargains amid the Christmas tree and all the decorations and angels on high. but we are searching for a special plaque. So it might be down this way. Pretty tree is here. I hope it's not underneath one of these benches. I'm not going to find it in the Christmas decorations.

If it was ever here. It's a plaque here. Now that it says Rockefeller Center. There's a turtle. Lots of angels on high. Big Christmas tree. Where is the plaque? Oh, wait.

Ira, is that? What's that behind those people? There it is. It says in the memory of David Hasek, 1769 to 1835, botanist physician, man of science and citizen of the world. On this site, he developed the famous Elgin Botanic Garden, 1801 to 1811, for the advancement of medical research and the knowledge of plants. It's a great story of the physician who attended that famous duel between Burr and

Hamilton, subject of a great new book we'll be talking about as soon as I get inside. Yes, and joining me now is Victoria Johnson, Associate Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College here in New York, and author of American Eden, David Hazzig, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic. And it's a finalist for this year's National Book Award for Nonfiction. Congratulations. Thank you. It was a great little trip out there to Rockefeller Center with Charles Berk. and I trying to find that plaque. Just to note, we won't be taking your calls today,

but we do have an excerpt of the book up at Science Friday.com slash American Eden. You have done a lot of hunting to assemble what must be the definitive biography of this revolutionary era physician, and botanist and statesman. How long have you been working on this? And what was your motivation? Well, it took me the better part of eight years

to do the research and write the book that's around my professor job teaching and so on. But I fell in love with this story when I read a book about the founding of the New York Botanical Garden, which was founded much later. It was founded 90 years later in 1891. And in this wonderful book

about the founding of the New York Botanical Garden, there was a couple pages about a man who had founded the precursor garden in New York. And it was the first public botanical garden in the United States. And then I read that not only was he the attending physician at the Hamilton Bird duel, but the land is now Rockefeller Center. And from the second I read that, I was sunk.

Yeah. What was there at Rockefeller Center and the whole area? Paint us a picture of what he created. So New York City was way down in the tip of Manhattan Island at the time. It was, so we're talking late 18th century. and the population was a little bit north of 60,000 people. If you took a carriage lane up the middle of the island called the Middle Road, you passed out of New York City, you passed farms, a few country estates here and there,

mostly at the edges of the rivers. And eventually you came into hilly, beautiful pastoral landscape covered with Mountain Laurel and Viburnum and Violet, just a stunning rural landscape. And so where the rock hats are kicking their heels, at that spot there was a conservatory and glass greenhouses? Yes, that didn't spring up organically. It was the product of incredibly hard work and an enormous expense on the part of David Husick, the doctor, who in 1801, bought 20 acres of land at the heart of Manhattan Island and spent the next decade creating the nation's first public botanical garden. One of the things he did was build a massive, by the day of standards, conservatory. Few Americans had ever seen anything like it.

It was almost 200 feet long, 20 feet high, and it stood on top of the highest point on his property. And you could see both rivers from the top. And so what was he doing? What was his idea to build this and this unique thing that didn't exist before? David Hussack's motivation for founding a botanical garden is a little bit distant to us today. We think often of botanical gardens as a beautiful place to attend a wedding or to stroll. And of course they do much more than that. They conduct education and research and so on today.

In Hussick's Day, botanical gardens in Europe were classrooms, laboratories, pharmacies, textbooks, textbooks, all rolled into one. And Hussack had discovered that as a young medical student at the greatest medical faculty in the world at the time, which was the University of Edinburgh. There he was trained in botanical gardens. And when he sailed back in 1794, he was inadvertently one of the best trained botanists in the United States. And so he went to Europe to be trained as a botanist or to work as a doctor, as a physician? He went to be trained as a physician. He had enrolled at Columbia during the 1780s, and he had grown up in Manhattan as a young boy during the British occupation in the Revolutionary War, and he was surrounded by blood and disease and death, and he fell in love with the idea of becoming a doctor and helping his fellow citizens. So he studied at Columbia, and then he studied with the great physician Benjamin Rush in Philadelphia. you. Rush, like some of Hussack's other mentors, had studied at Edinburgh because it was the most

advanced education. Hussick went there to study medicine. And one day, he was walking with his professor, who happened to have been named Alexander Hamilton, like probably a number of Scots. Not the Alexander Hamilton. Hazzick was walking in a garden with his professor, Alexander Hamilton, and a number of medical students. And he said, I was very young. very much mortified by my ignorance of botany. Everybody there had studied medical botany, and he caught fire with a passion to become a great botanist. There's an amazing story in the book of the young David Hazek attempting to save the life of our Alexander Hallamilton's son, Philip, right? Yes. In September 1797, when Hasick was back from Great Britain, he was established as

a medical professor and a doctor. He was the young partner of a doctor named Samuel Bard, who cared for all the fancy families in New York. And through Bard, Hussick began caring for both the Burr's, Aaron Burr and his daughter Theodosha, and the Hamilton's. And one night, Philip Hamilton was lying near death, stricken by a fever that was probably typhus or scarlet Tina, and the more established doctors could not figure out what to do to save him, and he was delirious and fainting and clearly near death. And Huzek was called in as a young doctor in experience, but with the most cutting-edge information from Britain.

And he tried something really risky, which was to increase Phillips' body temperature. And he did this through immersing him in a steaming bath that Huzagad had Peruvian barks Sincona bark, which is now known to contain quinine. But Hussick immersed Philip, raised his body temperature, and over the course of the night, managed to save his life. And there's a great scene at the end of the night when Philip was clearly out of danger. Hussick retired to a nearby bedroom to rest. He didn't want to leave the house in case Philip had a relapse.

he retired to a nearby bedroom and fell asleep. And when he awoke suddenly, he found Alexander Hamilton kneeling at his bedside with tears in his eyes. And Hamilton said, I couldn't remain one moment longer in my own house without thanking you for saving the life of my precious eldest son, Philip. But he could not save Alexander Hamilton's life following the duel. Correct. And even before we get to the duel, in 1801, four years after Hussick had saved Philip Hamilton's life, Philip fought a duel to defend his father's honor. And Hussick was unable to save Philip. And Philip died with Hussick at his bedside and Eliza and Alexander lying on either side of him, cradling their beloved son. Why do we know so little about this guy who was such a famous physician and then went on to become America's premier botanist? I think there are a couple of reasons.

I mean, I should say that we've mostly not heard of David Hussick. I often, when I'm giving book talks, ask for a show of hands. And if there's a botanist in the audience, I get a hand. But otherwise, it's usually dead silent. And I think there are a couple of reasons. One is that Hussick was famous for things that we don't celebrate as wildly and excitedly. He was famous for being a civic institution builder. He, in addition to founding his botanical garden, founded an astonishing array of other institutions in New York City, including the city's first obstinical.

It's the Unitedtrics Hospital, its first museum of fine arts, its first museum of natural history, its first public schools, its first school for the deaf. It just goes on and on and on. And he, in a way, I think, diffused his incredible energies so much that we don't have one thing to associate him with. All we have is a small plaque at 30 Rock. Yes. I mean, it's just amazing because I'm someone who likes to think of it myself. as knowledgeable of a revolutionary war history in New York, and I had heard, I have to confess, very little, if anything, about him. You're hoping your book now might open that up?

Yeah, more people are hearing his name, and there's been some interesting developments from the fact that people are now hearing about him. We are now finding more of his specimens, his herbarium specimens, their number at the New York Botanical Garden, and they're a on the hunt for more, and they are indeed finding more of those. There are a couple of other interesting developments I might share with you a bit later. Okay, that's good because we will take a break now and come back and talk lots more with Victoria Johnson, who is the author of a really great book. It's one of my favorites of the year. American Eden, David Hazick, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic. And we have an excerpt of her book up on our website at

Science Friday.com slash American Eden. Am I Refleader. This is Science Friday. We're talking this hour with Victoria Johnson about her new book, American Eden, David Hazick, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic. You started mentioning some of the civic institutions he founded. You were telling us about they're searching through now. Botanic gardens and finding samples. Yes. So while Hussick was developing his botanical garden, which he named the Elgin Botanic Garden after his father's birthplace in Scotland, he made it a clearinghouse for plant collections. And what he did was he took his Columbia medical students and two of his nephews, and they went tramping

through the fields and groves of Manhattan Island, collecting native species. So he had a huge collection of natives. And one of the things he was doing with those was some he would plant. and others he would dry to create an herbarium, literally a dry garden. And some of those specimens have survived to this day in the collections of the New York Botanical Garden, and we're finding more of those. Another thing he did with his garden was right to botanists all over the United States and the world asking for what are technically known as exotic plants, non-native species. And by 1810, he was growing the most incredible plants in this greenhouse on Manhattan Island,

avocados, figs, cum quads, beautiful trees from Japan, China. And when I show botanist today, his plant lists, which have survived, they shake their heads in amazement that he assembled such a spectacular collection over 200 years ago. Yeah, I was reading the book. I was, you know, I was trying to think about. how I could work on the idea that there was cotton growing in Mennan. I mean, it's just crazy. Yeah, that's a great story.

Hussick was a very bold young man. He was not at all shy, and he was so devoted to his idea of civic improvement that he would contact anyone for help and for plant specimens. He wrote to Thomas Jefferson, who was president. He knew all those people, didn't he? He did. He didn't know Jefferson at the time, and he wrote to President Jefferson and said, I've created a botanical garden.

When Lewis and Clark get back from their expedition, would you please send me some of their specimens? And Hussick went ahead and proposed another expedition to the Red River area and even proposed a leader for that expedition. And Thomas Jefferson basically blew him off, wrote a very dismissive, polite but dismissive letter. Well, fast forward a decade, Hussack is so accomplished and has become so admired by the likes of Jefferson and James Madison and Europeans like Alexander von Hombolt and Sir Joseph Banks, that Jefferson's now sending him seeds and compliments from Monticello regularly. That's great. You mentioned that there might be a few more plans to dust off his legacy, so to speak. Can you share them with this? Well, I'm currently working on a short documentary.

very short video with a wonderful graphic artist. It's hard to classify him, but his name's Markley Boyer, and he did the spectacular digital imagery for the book, Manahatta. That book, which was written by Eric Sanderson, changed the way a lot of us see Manhattan. And Markley Boyer is working with me to create a visual reconstruction of the elegant Botanic Garden using VR technology. So you will be able to walk through the Elgin Botanic Garden virtually when we're done with this. That's one thing we're working on. Another is quirkier and kind of wonderful. There's a team creating a restaurant at the edge of Rockefeller Center on Hussick's former property called the Elgin. And I've been working with them to incorporate visual references to

Hussick's life and work. There's got to be a TV series here, so. A mini-series? Yeah, I mean, all the things that he did and the challenges and the people he met. I think it would be great. Maybe somebody's listening. Let's talk more about what did you learn about the Hamilton Bird duel from Hazzek's point of view.

One thing I learned is that he never actually saw the duel itself, right? Right. When a doctor went to the duel, the doctor was often protected. from seeing the duel, even though everyone knew what was going on, everyone involved with it, by turning his back. So you wouldn't technically be a legal eyewitness to the duel. There's a great line in the Hamilton musical that's shared by Hamilton and Burr in the piece of Ten Dual Commandments, where they say, of the doctor, they say you pay him in advance, you treat him with civility,

you have him turn around so he can have deniability. Well, Huzik was not actually standing there on the dueling ground. They left him on the beach below. This was... In New Jersey. In New Jersey. So they are under the Palisades cliffs beneath the town of Wehawk. And the dueling ground was about halfway up the cliff.

And they left Hussick on the beach below when they arrived. So he wouldn't be able to testify as to who was there in the case of legal proceedings, even though everybody knew who was there. And while he was waiting, he could see all the way back to Elgin, to his botanical garden. It was a summer morning on one of the most beautiful rivers in the world. And I always think he must have noticed the flora growing around him, even in such a tense moment, because he was a collector. But he didn't know as he waited. He didn't know which of his admired friends, Alexander Hamilton or Aaron Burr, he would be called to find wounded or dead. Did Lynn Manuel Miranda got the story right?

Lynn Manuel Miranda got the story right in ways we never could have imagined. And it's not only in the sort of hewing to Ron Chernos' biography, but in bringing to life historical characters whom so many people now know so much more about. and identify with. And I think that's getting it right in a way that we can't get it right on the page. Yeah. Hamilton actually used to stop by Hazzix Botanical Garden on his way up on the island, didn't he? Yes.

Hamilton was in the early years of the 19th century building a country house up near the tiny village of Harlem, which was basically a crossroads. And he lived down in New York City and had a townhouse down there. The elegant botanic garden was at the halfway point of the island. And Hamilton would sometimes stop on his way up from New York City to the country house called the Grange to collect plant cuttings from his friend, Huzick, and to get horticultural advice. And Hamilton said around this time to another friend that horticulture was a pastime quote for which I am as little fitted as Jefferson to helm the United States, which was a big, self-deprecating insult about his gardening skills since he despised Jefferson. You write in this book about the sort of rudimentary way medicinal plants used to be classified,

like if it had red on it, it was probably good for treating the blood, not very scientific, right? So that was known as the doctrine of signatures. The idea was, it was held for this idea for millennia, and it still obtained during Hussick's medical training. The idea was that a plant looked a bit like or had some kind of marker that signaled what organ it treated. So lungwort, for example, which has spotted leaves, was thought to be good in bronchial infections and so on. And one of the things that made Housa a pioneer in this field was that when he founded his botanical garden for medical research, he understood that investigations into the chemical nature of plants was where the future of medicine was.

Plants contain secondary metabolites that do particular things for plants. They protect them from predators. But they also regulate bodily fluids and solids in a way that was very appealing to doctors in Hussick's era because the theory of the humor still sort of obtained the idea that you need to be in balance with your environment. So plants that made you sweat or vomit or gave you diarrhea or whatever bodily function you were after to regulate the body were the most sought after. And finding out the chemical nature that produced those effects was what Hussick was after. And he did conduct some of the first pharmacological research in the United States at the elegant Botanic Garden.

Did he make any breakthroughs? Did he discover stuff? He didn't find one cure for one illness, and I think this is another reason he's not famous today. What he did was teach an entire generation of American doctors, medical students, how to conduct scientific research, how to conduct chemical research on plants and how to try to figure out what plants that were native might have similar properties to rare, expensive, imported plants, such as Peruvian bark. He wanted to make the elegant botanic garden a pharmacy for plants that Americans needed in these waves of fever and so on. And in the run-up to the war of 1812, this turned out to be absolutely brilliant when supplies of rare plants and exotic plants were cut off. So he was more famous after his death, immediately after his death than the country than he is now.

He was well-known. Yes. When he suffered a stroke in 1835 at the age of 66, he didn't die right away. And as he lay in a coma on his sofa, in his townhouse, on july. Chambers Street. Bulletin's were printed in newspapers from New Hampshire to South Carolina about his condition and prayers were offered for his recovery. And even before this, he had been immortalized in paintings and busts and commemorative coins, one of which I'm wearing around my neck right now. And he had a chamelea named after him during his lifetime and a genus of American wildflower, which is the highest compliment a botanist can give to another human

being. And he was incredibly famous. And when he actually died a couple of days later, a newspaper said there's almost no man in America who is better known in his generation, both at home and to the professional world abroad. And yet we've forgotten them. You know, getting back to your point about him being forgotten after being so famous. I mean, we have Americans like Luther Burbank, who is a botan. Why do we remember that or him? And we don't remember how. Hasick? Did something happen? Or did we just, you know, have short memories? I think part of it is short memories, but I think, again, what Huzik did was, it was so vital, but it's so easy not to see. He trained not only a generation of American doctors in the scientific method.

Huzik brought into being a generation of professional American botanists where there had been almost none before. And some of Hussig's. six students' students went on to found the New York Botanical Garden, which in turn inspired a wave of Botanical Gardens' foundings across the country. So his legacy is more indirect, but is absolutely vital. And I think there's another really important reason we forget him when we're talking about the history of American botany and the natural environment. And that is that we pay so much attention to figures such as Emerson and Thorough, who were a generation or two later than Hussick. And they loom so large for us, and they were so inspiring to the American environmental

movement that we've kind of forgotten that there was this generation of naturalists who preceded them. And Walden Pond still exists where his gardens are buried underneath Rockefeller Center. Yes. No one would walk through Rockefeller Center and kind of realize that this is a pastoral landscape that was home to cotton and barley and 30 rock is shooting up from the fields of grain. Hussick was cultivating. Talking with Victoria Johnson, who is author of a great new book, Eden, American Eden, David Hazzick, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic. Just to note, we won't be taking your calls today, but we do have an excerpt of the book

up at ScienceFriday.com slash American Eden. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Wow. In this holiday season, if you're going to visit the tree and you want to do something special, go look for that

plaque. We found it, Charles and I found it. It's not easy to find, but it's there at the end of a pool with nymphs on top of a fish, the water's squirting out, and there's a plaque to Hazick, you know. Hopefully Before I heard of that, I thought maybe there might be a statue someplace.

Well, when the New York Botanical Garden was being founded by Hussack's intellectual grandchildren with the help of major figures such as Carnegie and Rockefeller and the Vanderbiltz and J.P. Morgan, someone argued in a local paper that there should be a statue to Hussick on the grounds of the New York Botanical Garden because it wouldn't have been created without his pioneering work 90 years earlier. It didn't happen for various reasons, but I don't think it's really needed. I don't think we need to recognize that one man. I think his spirit is present under every microscope in every flower bed all through the garden, that garden and others across the country because he was the pioneering botanist.

of the young nation. So he left the legacy? He did. He left an incredible legacy, and it's not just for botany and medicine. I think his legacy of investing in civic institutions, investing the time and energy and personal fortune. I mean, he went into enormous debt, creating his institutions. I think that deserves celebrating today, and it's one reason. And I'm so excited to share his story with readers and audiences.

And it's a great story. It's an absolute excellent book. Victoria Johnson, thank you for writing it. Thank you. It was a joy. Well, you know, as someone who follows American history and especially around the New York area, I really appreciate it. Victoria Johnson, an associate professor of urban policy and planning at Hunter College here in New York, and author of American Eden, David Hazick, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early

Republic. This will open up your eyes to a lot of great stuff. Thank you. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you. And we have an excerpt of her book up on our website at Science Friday.com slash American Eden. We're going to take a break. And after the break, New Horizons took us to distant Pluto. And now that little probe has a new mission even further from home. It all unfolds on New Year's Eve. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. This New Year's Eve, while many of us are at parties ringing out the old. A group of scientists will be hard at work watching and waiting for the new. Gathered at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory,

they'll be biting their nails over the fate of something very small and far away. The plucky New Horizons space probe, barreling at over 30,000 miles per hour toward a tiny and distant object called Ultima Tuli. And as you know, New Horizons, has already visited and discovered unexpected secrets held by Pluto and its moons. And if all goes well, cold little Ultima will be the first object we've ever visited in the rocky Kuiper Belt Beyond. It could tell us a wealth of information about the earliest days of our solar system. And if you're on the east coast of the U.S., this close encounter will happen right about

when you finished your midnight champagne. Happy New Year, indeed. Here to tell us more. New Horizons principal investigator, Dr. Alan Stern, is also co-author of the book Chasing New Horizons and a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Welcome back, Alan. Thank you, Ira. It's great to be here. You know, when we last saw New Horizons, it was taking us to Pluto, the original purpose of the mission, right? I remember those gorgeous photos and everything. Give us the greatest hits from that flyby.

Well, I like to say the solar system saved the best. for last. Pluto just astounded us with the range of geologic diversity, its phenomenal blue atmosphere, and it taught us an important lesson that small planets can be as active as big planets, even billions of years after formation. We thought that small planets would cool off and their geological engine would die, but Pluto is active like the Earth and Mars here after all this time. And we're rewriting a textbook. about it. It's truly surprising stuff then, right? It really is. And it begs us, I think, to go back and explore other dwarf planets as well, way out in the Kuiper Belt. Well, let's talk about the Kuiper Belt.

Even further from home, what is so interesting about this region of space? You know, I call it the solar system's attic. It's a region beyond the giant planets, beyond Neptune's orbit. It's vast. It's bigger than all the space from the sun out to Neptune times several. It's teeming with billions of comets, millions of these things like ultimatuli we call planetesimals, and dozens of dwarf planets, all formed four and a half billion years ago and kept in this amazing deep freeze because they're so far from the sun where things don't really age unless they're planet-sized. So it's like a time capsule into the history of our solar system, and that's what makes it so valuable. So by sending New Horizons out that, you're sort of going back in time. Precisely. Tell us about Ultima Tully itself.

Why did you choose this little object less than what, 20 miles across to zero in on it? Right. It's about the size of New York City. We chose Ultima because of its orbit type that tells us that it was formed out there, not transported out there from closer regions of the solar system, but it's kind of a bedrock sample of that part of the solar system. And it was along our path. We only had to fire our engines to retarget it with just a small amount of fuel.

And it was accessible to us. But it's going to teach us, I think, an amazing, amazing lessons about the formation of the planets. Because this is one of those intermediate-sized building blocks, much larger than comets, you know, thousands of times larger than comets, but on the other hand, thousands of times smaller. than planets. It's one of those things that was on the way to becoming a planet, but never really fully grew up. And so it's kind of an embryo, if you will, a planetary embryo. And we're bringing these phenomenal cameras and spectrometers and other sensors along to find out what this guy is all about. And we're going to do it on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day turn in

2019. Can't wait. I'll bet. Do you have any idea about what it might be made of? Not in detail. We think it'll be an icy body because of its position out in the outer solar system where ices are so common. But besides water ice, you know, it could have these extreme volatiles on its surface like Pluto does, molecular nitrogen, carbon monoxide in frozen form, methane, which is natural gas. These are common ices on bigger worlds. And we want to understand whether they were imported into these worlds with these smaller building blocks or whether those ices were created in some chemistry.

inside of planets like Pluto. So how old do we think these objects are? Oh, they're ancient. They date back to the formation of our solar system, and we have samples we can radioactively date that go all the way back to 4.6 billion years ago, unimaginably old. So these are possibly objects that would have formed planets?

How would they have formed from the Kuiper Belt? You know, everything in the solar system that's large was once something smaller, just like when, you know, adults used to be babies and babies used to be embryos. It's similar. Small things grow into larger and larger things. We only have a small number of planets compared to the billions of comets in the solar system, comets being just a mile or two across.

This is an intermediate-sized object that was on its way up from just comet size and made it to, you know, city-sized, but not continent or earth-sized. Is this an object? that might have turned into a comet someday? Not really, because for two reasons. First, it's much larger than a comet, thousands of times more massive. But secondly, out there in the cold reaches of the Kuiper belt, it can't develop the kind of tail and coma that make a comet look like a comet.

That happens because it's heated when it comes close to the sun. Ultima is more than 4 billion miles from the sun. This is going to be the farthest object ever explored in the history of space exploration. Okay. Now, take us on a ride to Ultima. What do you expect to happen? Give us a sequence of events that's going to happen. Well, on New Year's day, we will swoop down just 33 minutes into the new year

within a distance of about 2,200 miles of this guy using our telescopes, our cameras, and spectrometers to find out what it's made of, to find out. out about its geology, whether it has moons, rings, whether it has an atmosphere, and more. For example, we'll take its temperature. We'll measure its radar reflectivity and form a basic picture of what these Kuiper belt objects are like as we swoop by in just a matter of about 24 hours and gather all this data. And then the spacecraft is off even deeper into the Kuiper belt. Is there any thought about perhaps landing on one of these objects someday? Well, maybe someday. We want to start with a reconnaissance mission like New Horizons, where you

have a flyby, you find out what it's all about, then usually we go back with orbiters if it's scientifically important and stay and map it in much more detail and determine where the landing sites could be and so forth. And then the natural third stage is to bring in landers. How much more difficult is this flyby than the one to Pluto? That's a really good question. And most people don't realize that this is a lot tougher than the flyby of Pluto. And there are a number of reasons why. For example, because the spacecraft is older, its radioactive nuclear power supply isn't producing as much power. It has a finite half-life, and every year it produces less wattage. So we have to manage the power

on board the spacecraft much more carefully. Because the flyby is much further from the sun, the lighting levels are lower, and so the instruments have to strain more in order to see in that darkness way out there. And because it's further from the Earth, the communications time, you know, it's very far away, four billion miles. So it takes... six hours to send commands to it, and we take six hours to find out if they worked, 12-hour round trip. At Pluto, it was only nine hours. And then, to top it all off, Ultim is a hundred times smaller diameter than Pluto. So navigating to it, finding it out there in the darkness, and targeting it, homing in on it, is a lot tougher assignment. And you put all that together

between the power and the communications challenges, the navigation challenges, and everything else, It's going to be a real challenge for this spacecraft, but I think our team's up to it, and we're looking forward to this exploration. Has it been spotted yet? We did. We spotted as far back as August with our cameras on board, and, of course, as we're getting closer, it's easier and easier. It's getting brighter and brighter, but it's still just a dot in the distance, even days before this flyby. It will only appear as a resolved object in the final day or so. And then as we swoop down over it, we'll ultimately get, no pun intended, ultimately get better pictures than we got of Pluto and its satellites because we're going so much closer. Right now it must be like pixelated, right?

It's just a pixel. It's just a pixel. It's just a pixel. We've been chasing this guy for three and a half years over a billion miles of space, and we're still not close enough to see anything more than a dot in a distance. Okay, so what's the data you're most looking forward to is the best story going to be? told in the photos or some other instrument on board? Well, I think there are two that rank right up there at the top. There are the photos, and we'll have both color and black and white.

We'll even have stereo so we can map the surface topography. But in addition, we have a compositional spectrometer, a device that tells us what things are made of, that can map the surface and tell us where every location what it's made of. Even look into the interior by looking into windows like create. that penetrate the surface and give us a view inside. So you'll be able to have that kind of resolution when you go by? Absolutely. If we were flying over New York City at the same altitude that we're going to pass by Ultima,

we look down on city streets and see individual buildings. We could even see very large buses on streets, see the wharfs on the Hudson, count the ponds in Central Park. This is some pretty amazing instrumentation on board New Horizons. Can we follow along with the flyby somehow? Yeah, there are a lot of ways to do that. NASA television is one. Facebook Live will be streaming it as well.

There are lots of different Twitter channels and Facebook sites, Instagram, all that. If you just Google Ultimatoulli New Horizons or NASA New Horizons, you can find all those social channels and follow it. It'll be streaming in real time. And then again, NASA Television and Facebook Live for the actual events around closest approach. And then we'll find out the next day, did it all work, and we'll see the first images. Those press conferences will be covered on Facebook Live, NASA TV, and no doubt on news all around the world. I'm intrigued by the name of this Kuiper Belt object. Where did it come from?

You told us to Google it, what are we going to come up with besides? Ultima's name came from a naming contest. It's a nickname, actually. The official designator for this guy is 2014 MU69, but who wants to say that all the time? So we had a naming contest last year, finished up early this year. The public put in naming suggestions and voted on it. Ultima was one of the ones that rose to the very top. And Ultimatuli is a Latin phrase that means beyond the known world or beyond the farthest

frontiers, which is very much what Ultimatouli is, what 2014 Emu 69. is. So it's a great name, I think, for the farthest object ever explored in space. But it is just a nickname. I think after we see what it's all about, we'll figure out a permanent name for it. And I don't know what that's going to be just yet. Stay tuned. I'm Ira Flato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with Dr. Alan Stern, principal investigator of NASA's New Horizons mission and planetary sciences at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder. Why did you make the decision to go there after Pluto?

I mean, was it far back in getting to Pluto, or did you get there and say, hey, we could do something after this? Well, actually, when the National Academy of Sciences ranked the exploration of Pluto at the top of the list for a space mission, this was 15 or more years ago back in the early 2000s, they specifically described this mission as a two-year-old. part mission first to the Pluto system and then on to explore the Kuiper Belt. And we built new horizons with all of the capabilities to go on for years out into the Kuiper belt, to have the power and the communications capability, to work in those lower lighting levels, etc.

So we were purpose built to do this. And after we successfully explored Pluto, we chose this target and then fired our engines to start homing in on it back in late 2015. And we've been on the chase ever since. You have enough juice left to go to some place else? Well, we do. We have the power to run New Horizons out into the 2030s. Spacecraft's in super health. It's not using any of its backup systems because nothing's failed.

And we have a fuel. Don't say that. Don't say that. We have fuel on board, and we're going to go looking for another target further out in the Kuiper Belt with hopefully another flyby in the 2020s. Really? But you haven't chosen the object yet. No, we'll do that. We're paying attention to getting Ultima right, so we'll choose that in the future.

You know, we're always fascinated by how long it takes these missions to be planned, the technology that has to be put aboard them. I'm thinking of other spacecraft that are still working out there, some of them that still have, you know, cassette players on them or eight tracks or whatever. How long ago was this designed and what kind of technology is on there? Well, New Horizons is pretty sophisticated. It was designed in the early part of the 2000s decade, designed primarily in 2002 and 3 and built in 2004 and 5, launched in 2006. And it's got, you know, modern flash drives, for example, for solid state memory. It's got state-of-the-art propulsion and computing capability for that day. Very reliable instrumentation, which is what you want when you send a single spacecraft on a long journey like this. So how are you sleeping these days? I'm doing just fine, and I think our team is, too. We're pretty excited.

But, you know, this is what we've trained for, and we've been through a lot of mission simulations, and we are on Ultima's doorstep and ready to go do this thing. So New Year's Eve, coming up, you'll be popping the champagne about what time do you think? Well, pop the champagne at midnight, and then 33 minutes into the new year. New Horizons will make its closest approach to Ultima,

and the next morning we'll get radio signals back from the Kuiper Belt arriving at the speed of light from way out there four billion miles away to tell us how it all went. And that same day, on January 1st, we'll have the first real detailed images that will release on January 2nd. So we're going to go from knowing almost nothing about this mysterious Kuiper Belt object, Ultimutouli, to really knowing it as a real place and being able to study it scientifically in just the space of 3rd, 36 or 48 hours. Well, we wish you great luck, Alan. Well, thank you, Ira.

Alan Stern, principal investigator of NASA's New Horizons mission and a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. One last thing before we go. Educators, we want you to be part of our 2019 educator collaborative program. You'll work directly with SciFRI staff to create innovative and engaging classroom resources alongside other elite teachers from around the country. Now, applications are due January 4th. So get started by visiting sciencefriety.com slash educator.

BJ Leatherman composed our theme music. And if you missed any part of the program, we'd like to hear it again. Subscribe to our podcasts. And if you have a smart speaker, ask it to play Science Friday, whatever you want. So every day now is Science Friday. And of course, we are active on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and on all our social media. Have a happy new year. I'm Ira Flato in New York.