New Horizons Pluto Mission

Floor Speech

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Mr. MARKEY. Mr. President, 46 years ago yesterday, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to walk on the Moon.

September will bring the 53rd anniversary of President Kennedy's speech that launched America on the quest to land them on the Moon. He set that goal for the country not because it was easy but because it was hard. I am here to congratulate the men and women of the New Horizons mission for making the hard work of sending a spacecraft to Pluto look easy.

One week ago today, what had once been a fuzzy picture of Pluto came into sharp focus. Dramatic transformations inspire everyone. As you can see, NASA delivered an amazing before-and-after story. Until the New Horizons flyby, the best picture we had of Pluto offered little detail of our neighbor at the edge of the solar system, but now we can see distinct features on its surface, including something that looks like a heart. Who couldn't love that. Thank you for this great picture.

It took the New Horizons spacecraft 9 1/2 years to cross the 3 billion miles between Pluto and Earth, but it was a mission much longer in the making.

In the late 1980s, a group of scientists came together to advocate for sending a spacecraft to the edge of the solar system. Such a mission would tell us more about Pluto and once again push back the edge of the known frontier. Many of those scientists are still involved with the New Horizons mission, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's own Richard Binzel.

While these scientists pushed to get the green light for the mission, it was only achieved by the partnership between NASA, some of our best U.S. universities and the aerospace industry, and the hard work and innovation of their scientists, engineers, and staff.

From just the initial information returned this week, scientists have to rethink what they thought they knew about Pluto, its Moons, and its space environment. Images came back of mountains of frozen water as high as the Rocky Mountains on Pluto. On its Moon Charon, we can now see deep canyons and a row of cliffs and troughs stretching 600 miles, as far as from Washington, DC, to Atlanta.

Instruments on the New Horizons probe confirm that the Pluto system contains a large amount of frozen water. That is an essential building block of life. One thing scientists didn't see--many of the meteorite impact craters--suggests that Pluto was geologically active relatively recently.

The voyage of discovery from the flyby will continue for years to come. Not only will scientists learn more, but they will also train the next generation of planetary scientists. I am proud the youngest member of the New Horizons team is Alissa Earle, a graduate student at MIT.

The New Horizons team is following in the great American exploration tradition. They are pushing back the boundaries of geography, knowledge, and technology. In doing so, they are inspiring the world. No matter what you think of the classification of Pluto as a dwarf planet, we can all agree that the New Horizons mission is already a massive achievement.

I look forward to the further revelations it will bring as its data streams back to Earth and it travels to the far edges of our solar system.

Finally, I would like to note that in the same week of taking us to Pluto, NASA also commenced the continuous monitoring of the Sun and the Earth--the only home humans have known thus far. I hope the events of this past week confirm the importance of using all of NASA's tools to further the exploration of our solar system and universe and better understand our own planet as well.

I yield back the remainder of my time.

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