The historic flyby of Pluto by the New Horizons spacecraft July 14 has turned what we know about the dwarf planet upside down. This newly revealed world will be illuminated in a talk at Cornell by two scientists on the New Horizons mission: Cathy Olkin, deputy project scientist, and Ann Harch, lead sequencer of the science instruments on board the spacecraft.

Their presentation, “Our New View of Pluto,” will be held Wednesday, Dec. 2, at 7:30 p.m. in Rockefeller Hall’s Schwartz Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.

“We’ve been waiting almost 10 years for this look at Pluto, and it was worth the wait,” says Phil Nicholson, professor of astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences. “The New Horizons data show that Pluto has huge mountains – perhaps even volcanoes – of water ice. They tower above plains covered by frozen nitrogen and methane. Charon, Pluto’s largest moon, has huge canyons crossing its icy surface, and some of Pluto’s other moons seem to be spinning chaotically.”

Even now only a small fraction of the data from the New Horizons flyby has been received, due to the small size of the craft’s radio antenna and its immense distance from Earth (more than 30 times the distance of the Earth to the sun). Many more surprises are likely in store over the coming months, says Nicholson.

Olkin, a planetary scientist at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, has been involved with the New Horizons mission since the beginning, including spacecraft development, launch and flight. With degrees in aerospace engineering from MIT and Stanford, she has worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on interplanetary missions, including Cassini. The promise of Cassini’s exciting science inspired her to return to MIT to study planetary science, she says, and she received her Ph.D. in 1996. She has since worked at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona investigating the rings of Saturn and has used Hubble Space Telescope data to measure the mass ratio of Charon to Pluto.

Harch, a resident of Brooktondale, New York, and former research support specialist at Cornell’s Department of Astronomy/Center for Radiophysics and Space Research (since renamed Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science), has worked in the field of science operations on NASA planetary missions for more than 31 years, designing command sequences that operate and point the science instruments during robotic flybys of distant targets.

Her mission experience includes Voyager at Uranus and Neptune, the Galileo asteroid flybys, the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous Mission, and MESSENGER to Mercury. For the past 13 years she has worked on the New Horizons Mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt in the role of uplink technical lead. At the Dec. 2 talk she will discuss some of the challenges they faced imaging six small bodies at a distance of over 3 billion miles from Earth with a small robot traveling at 30,000 mph.

The talk is sponsored by Cornell’s Department of Astronomy.

Linda B. Glaser is a staff writer for the College of Arts & Sciences.