NOVA

Four billion miles from Earth,

a spacecraft closes in on its target,

a mysterious object far beyond all the known planets

that could reveal new secrets

about the birth of the solar system.

But the mission is risky.

Even being hit

by something smaller than a single pellet of rice

at 32,000 miles an hour

would be catastrophic,

and we would lose the mission.

The spacecraft that brought us to Pluto

is now attempting an even more challenging final quest.

Can it succeed?

There's only one shot,

and if you make a mistake, that could be it.

"Pluto and Beyond."

Right now, on "NOVA."

January 1, 2019.

It's the arrival of a new year.

But here at Mission Ops, the mood is tense.

The team is feeling a little stressed.

A team of scientists,

along with their families and friends,

are waiting in anticipation...

I'm getting a little bit nervous.

For the arrival of a signal

from a tiny spacecraft on a dangerous mission.

Its name: New Horizons.

We are really pressing the limits here.

"New Horizons" is attempting

to fly by a mysterious object

far beyond the planets we've come to know,

a billion miles beyond Pluto,

in the outback of the solar system.

This is the farthest exploration in the history of humankind,

and nobody's planning anything like it ever again.

This is really challenging.

We're going to a small object that we don't know a lot about.

In fact,

one of the biggest, baddest space telescopes in our arsenal,

the Hubble,

can only capture a pixelated image of this tiny speck.

Its official name is 2014 M.U.69,

but the New Horizons team

also calls it by the Latin name Ultima Thule.

We gave it this nickname Ultima Thule

that means "beyond the farthest frontiers."

And in fact, it really is

beyond the known world

or part of our solar system that we have explored.

Here, objects like Ultima Thule have been frozen in time

since the solar system formed

four-and-a-half billion years ago.

We believe this object, like many others out there,

are actually planetary embryos.

And to study those objects will give us a great window

into the process of planetary formation.

For the New Horizons team,

taking their spacecraft into the unknown

is not only a monumental task,

it's risky.

An object the size of a pea or even smaller

would be capable of literally taking out the spacecraft.

Tests have revealed that as the spacecraft travels

at 36,000 miles an hour,

even something as small as a grain of sand

could rip a hole right through it.

At this point in the mission,

you really have to be prepared for anything.

But for now,

all the team can do is wait,

and hope that years of work will pay off

and that the tiny explorer manages to stay on target...

And survive.

I love this spacecraft.

I've put my blood, sweat, and tears

into helping to put this thing together,

going back to 2002.

It's just made us feel so proud.

Proud, because when it comes to exploring our solar system,

New Horizons is already a pioneer.

January 19, 2006.

New Horizons is prepared for launch at Cape Canaveral.

Two... one.

We have ignition and lift-off

of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft

on a voyage to visit the planet Pluto and beyond.

The spacecraft sets out on a journey to reach not one,

but two distant targets.

Along the way, Alice Bowman, missions operations manager...

Also known as MOM...

Will help guide it through a voyage

that will last more than a decade.

We talk about the spacecraft as if it's our child.

When we launched, you know, we referred to it as a baby.

When it does something that we don't expect,

we relate it perhaps to terrible twos

or something like that,

so it really, it becomes part of us.

78 days after launch,

New Horizons passes the orbit of the red planet, Mars.

Just two months later, it flies through the asteroid belt.

In a year, it passes by Jupiter,

where it captures spectacular images of a volcanic eruption

on the gas giant's moon lo.

It was the first time that time-lapse

had ever been made of any volcano

anywhere in the universe off the Earth.

So it was really unique.

The spacecraft travels another two-and-a-half billion miles

past the orbits of three more giant planets...

Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

Finally, nine years after launch,

New Horizons closes in on its first fly-by target...

Pluto and its moons.

They have only been observed from billions of miles away,

our best images nothing more than a blur.

Until, in the summer of 2015, it slowly comes into view.

Every day, it was getting bigger and bigger and bigger

and starting to reveal this world.

It was an incredible ride.

The mission is proceeding without a hitch.

All is working as planned,

but then...

On July 4, 2015, just ten days before the Pluto fly-by...

I got a call

from the New Horizons principal investigator, Alan Stern.

I could hear that he was panting.

He was running down the hallway here at APL.

He said, "We lost contact with the spacecraft,"

and I said, "You've got to be kidding."

You know, this has never happened before.

You just feel, you know,

that pit in the bottom of your stomach.

Your pulse goes up a little bit.

Could it be, you know,

these millions of miles away, we hit something?

Is the spacecraft still in one piece?

The team races to figure out what's gone wrong.

It took a little while, but we realized

exactly what had happened is, we had overloaded the computer.

That's sort of like

your worst nightmare

a week before an encounter.

We knew that we could fix it.

The question was:

Were we going to be able to do that in enough time?

Alice, I swear, didn't get any sleep,

but she said she slept on the floor

for a few minutes one night.

For a couple of nights, slept there,

you know, just like a child that's sick.

You want to be there to help it recover along the way.

The team works round the clock,

re-uploading instructions to the spacecraft's computer.

Alice Bowman, our mission operations manager,

and her team

did a fantastic job

of putting everything back together again

with only six hours to spare.

Just in time for the fly-by.

Okay, we're in lock with carrier.

July 14, 2015.

Three billion miles from Earth,

New Horizons should have just flown above Pluto's surface,

taking pictures and gathering data.

But did it make it?

Stand by for telemetry.

Alice waits to hear back from the spacecraft...

A sign it has safely completed the fly-by.

New Horizons is so far away,

it takes four-and-a-half hours

for that signal to reach Earth.

MOM on Pluto 1.

We have a healthy spacecraft.

We've recorded data of the Pluto system.

It was a huge sense of relief and accomplishment.

I think mostly accomplishment.

We did it.

- We did, we did. - It's just great.

The first up-close images come in.

And they shock the world.

When the images first came down from New Horizons,

I was stunned, excited, tired...

Every emotion and feeling you can imagine,

but really just amazed at what they looked like.

This tiny world, with a diameter less than 1,500 miles,

turns out to be incredibly complex,

with mountains more than a mile high.

The Rocky Mountains here are beautiful,

and the Flatirons in the background,

but instead of rock,

the mountains on Pluto were made of ice,

and at those temperatures,

ice is so cold, it's like bedrock.

Pluto's most famous feature, its heart,

contains a massive glacier that flows across its surface.

I certainly did not expect

a glacier of nitrogen and methane ices.