The long-delayed sequel to my 'Before Sunrise'-style love story with a planet that no longer exists
Do you have a complicated relationship with your home? Maybe you love it and hate it in equal measure, and yet find yourself, time and again, defending it from those who fail to understand its worth. Maybe you plan to never return, and yet, for better or worse, you feel like you’ll never really leave. We carry all the people we’ve loved with us, but places can bury themselves in us too.
I have two homes that matter. The first is Texas, and it will live in me all my life. The second, unfortunately, is Pluto.
Ten years ago, at 11:49 UTC on July 14, 2015, the spacecraft New Horizons made its closest approach to Pluto. After passing just 7,750 miles (12,472 km) above its surface, it sent back images that would transform scientists’ understanding of the Solar System and captivate audiences of laypeople across the world. The faint dot of light seen from the Hubble Space Telescope was now a real (dwarf) planet, with a shockingly wide array of colorful geologic features. The new Pluto was covered in massive canyons, flowing glaciers, and meandering dunes; it had an atmosphere and tenuous signs of volcanism. It was, in the geologic sense of the word, alive. For many people, the New Horizons flyby would begin an enduring fascination with a Solar System body that’s mostly known for being the little planet that wasn’t.
One of those people was me.
On July 14, 2015, I was a twenty-year-old intern at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, right next door to Johnson Space Center. I’d spent the summer making my first attempts at business casual clothing despite the oppressive Texas humidity (thus developing a lifelong hatred for pencil skirts), and wondering if I was really allowed to be here. Intern Adeene was the epitome of the college student who’s still Figuring Things Out, pursuing degrees in history and geophysics solely for the joy of it and paying little thought as to where I might apply my strange yet growing skillset. When I became a planetary science intern after applying on a whim, I was incredibly excited, since doing geology on other planets was the coolest thing I could imagine, and extremely nervous. In between staring at walls lined with decades of breakthrough discoveries and sitting at my tiny desk diving into scientific literature for the first time, I wondered whether someone would realize they’d made a mistake. I was surrounded by planetary scientists, and while I wanted desperately to be like them, it felt like we were living in two separate worlds. I had the interest, but not the expertise or the talent.
Then New Horizons came to Pluto, and Pluto came to me.
There’s nothing planetary scientists love more than celebrating some new science. Over the years I’ve attended parties for the Mars rover landing, the DART spacecraft’s asteroid collision, the return of OSIRIS-REx, and many others. It’s the heady feeling of knowing we’re going to see something no one’s ever seen before — a celebration of knowledge itself. In 2015, the Lunar and Planetary Institute was humming with excitement, especially since some of their scientists were on the mission team. I could walk past the offices of the experts who’d process raw New Horizons data and turn it into something the rest of us could see. I’d peer at the nameplates, captivated by the knowledge that these people were going to build the first maps of another world. They were turning Pluto from an unknown expanse into a place with features and names. They were taking the unknown, and turning it into the known.
I never told the New Horizons science team this, but the pictures they made in those first days after the flyby changed my life. On July 14, 2015, I saw Pluto, and what I saw seemed like a miracle. How did a tiny world three billion miles away still manage to have brilliant white glaciers, ancient mountains, and hints of strange new volcanism? How could a place so cold, with a surface just 44 degrees above absolute zero, be so alive? And was there any possibility that I could join the team, and answer the questions I kept asking?
I left the Lunar and Planetary Institute at the end of the summer and returned to my life as a college student, eagerly leaving business casual behind. But I was also left wondering if I’d ever get to be a part of Pluto’s narrative. Watching the science team do their work was like staring through the glass at a world meant for the minds of the best and brightest. It was awe-inspiring, but also intimidating, because I didn’t feel like the best and brightest. I felt like a mountain climber standing at the foot of a very tall mountain, made of all the knowledge that separated me from Pluto and the people that got to learn about Pluto. But at the end of that summer, I decided to climb.
Five years ago I wrote about my relationship to Pluto and called it a love story.
This is still a love story – just not the one I thought I was telling.
Six years ago, I got to what I thought was this love story’s happy ending. After four years of struggle, winding my way through different projects on different planets and doubting my own abilities, I started working on what would become my PhD dissertation: finding the origin of the massive feature on Pluto called Sputnik Planitia. Pluto and I were together at last, and while it certainly wasn’t easy, I was overjoyed that I’d made it. Someone was willing to take a chance on me and my weird mishmash of skills, and there was a Pluto project ready for the taking. But the fear born in 2015 still lingered: I’d gotten what I wanted, but could I become good enough at science to keep it?
Sputnik Planitia, the site of my PhD research, is known to the rest of the world as Pluto’s “heart.” It’s a massive elliptical basin that starts to taper on its southern end, creating a pseudo-teardrop shape which, when combined with the bright white of its interior that contrasts strongly with neighboring darker terrain, makes it look like the left lobe of a massive planetary heart. It’s also — we think — a massive impact crater, excavated when something hundreds of kilometers across slammed into Pluto billions of years ago and left a colossal scar behind. When it comes to geology, features as large and beautiful as Sputnik Planitia are earned the hard way, and usually indicate massive planetary upheaval. The day Sputnik Planitia formed was a bad day to be on Pluto — the impact would have displaced most of the ice beneath the crater floor, creating massive curtains of ejecta that showered the rest of the planet in kilometers of impact-induced snow. It also, of course, left a very big hole. Today the ancient impact basin is a geologic marvel, one that makes Pluto look like a jeweled ornament floating in the Kuiper Belt.
Sputnik Planitia isn’t just cool to look at, though. Impact basins are also a planetary science gold mine, precisely because of how destructive they are. Hitting a planet hard enough to create a hole larger than the state of Alaska means excavating deep into the interior of Pluto; the resulting seismic wave was likely strong enough to pass from one side of the planet to the other, traveling through each layer of Pluto’s interior on its way down. As scientists use what we’ve learned from New Horizons to try to figure out why Pluto is the way it is, understanding the impact that formed Sputnik Planitia provides key information we can’t get any other way — things like the composition of the planet’s core, whether it has (or had) an ocean, and whether that ocean could have stuck around for billions of years. Fortunately, we can kind of recreate the day Sputnik Planitia formed, because we’ve developed tools to simulate what happens when two planetary bodies collide. All you need is the biggest, best computer you can get your hands on, someone to give you access to the right code, and enough time to learn how to use it.
When I started the Sputnik Planitia project, I was convinced I had the coolest job on the planet. What could be cooler than blowing up another planet? To my family’s dismay, it was so cool that I was willing to move across the country yet again to keep doing it. I packed and unpacked my life with Pluto-driven excitement, but I also couldn’t quite stop being terrified. After years of being told I didn’t have enough math or physics to make it in the modelling side of planetary science, here I was being handed a code written mostly in Fortran and told to learn enough about hypervelocity impact physics to understand what happened when my models went wrong.
It was a firehouse of information, and I was left scrambling to learn not just how to use the code, but process its outputs. As any modeler knows, most models produce far more data than we can actually use; part of our job is to dig through all the numbers and figure out a) what’s going on, and b) how to show other people what’s going on in a way they can understand. As someone whose coding skills could best be described as “okay,” I had a steep learning curve ahead of me. I also had a desperate urge to succeed as quickly as possible, not just to prove I was a worthy investment for the people who’d taken a chance on me, but also to prove to it myself. Sure, I’d had to switch projects, planets, and states halfway through my PhD, but I was certain that if I worked hard enough, I’d come out the other side. I would finally be the scientist I’d dreamed of.
What was I willing to do to make that dream a reality? Everything.
Science runs on love. That’s not a very scientific thing to say, but it’s true. Scientists in the U.S. are underpaid and overworked, and that treatment is made possible by the justification that science is more than a profession — it’s a calling. Truly committed scientists can tolerate bad pay and poor conditions because we love what we do; we trust that love will fill in the gaps, like lacquer repairing a broken plate. We then repeat this lie to each other and to our students, even though anyone who’s seen a love story knows that love is a powerful thing, but it can’t fix systemic problems. Still, it’s a nice lie, right? I believed it too; I believed it when I was twenty, and still believed it when I was twenty-five. If I loved Pluto enough, and worked hard enough, I’d be a Pluto scientist for the rest of my life, and I’d always be happy.
Have you ever been infatuated with someone far less interested in you, and instead of walking away, you find yourself trying to invent a new version of you that will make them happy? Over the course of my PhD, I rearranged more and more of my life for Pluto, and called that love. When I slept, I dreamed of Pluto — though that’s probably because I woke up intermittently each night to check on my simulations as soon as they finished. (Sleep was a barrier to my capacity to work as efficiently as possible.) As the years wore on, I became terminally exhausted, and also deeply boring to talk to unless what you wanted to talk about was Pluto, which very few people did. I didn’t really have hobbies — I was too tired to read books, watch movies, or make art like I used to. I’d turned myself into a machine that could only study Pluto, sleep, or stare at a wall, and while I could tell that it scared my friends and made my family sad, I couldn’t stop. In my mind this was the least I could do, for Pluto and for myself. This was my calling. This was love! I just needed to make this sacrifice, and I’d finally get to the great future that was just out of my reach.
Several years into the unstable status quo I’d created, and very close to what I thought was the end of my PhD, I noticed a systematic error in my code that affected every single Pluto model I’d ever run. The initial confusion was followed by a massive wave of panic. I walked jerkily out of the room with ears ringing and hands shaking until I came back to myself, standing in the middle of the local pedestrian bridge in the peak of summer, sweating and sobbing and convinced my entire life was over. (Why was I on the pedestrian bridge? I’d developed a habit of going on walks when I knew I was going to cry, because the stress of strangers seeing me in tears usually snapped me out of it — follow me for more lifestyle tips!) The only thing I could feel was an intense despair, and I couldn’t articulate it to anyone without seeming entirely unhinged. After all, no one in their right mind has a mental breakdown over a simple math error, especially one that can eventually be fixed. But in my mind, the error wasn’t the problem; it was me. How could anyone who truly loved Pluto, and who was really a scientist, make a mistake so basic?
As I paced up and down the bridge, covered in sweat and snot and dodging looks from concerned passers-by, I had no idea what to do. I’d given up every boundary I had, pushed my body and mind to their limit, and not only was it not enough, it was a colossal failure. Many people over the years had told me I didn’t have enough innate talent or the right skills or the proper coursework, and I’d done exactly what they’d expected me to do. I was a failure and a fraud, and my career was dissolving like wet tissue paper. Worse still, the love story itself was collapsing. I’d spent years living and breathing Pluto, and instead of making me happy, it had made me so tired I had nothing left over to be happy about. I couldn’t quit. I’d come so close to finishing that quitting was unimaginable. But I also couldn’t imagine what my life would be if I kept going, now that I’d validated every fear I’d ever had. All the dread and uncertainty hung over me like a cloud — one shaped like Pluto and its heart.
I really only had one choice. I was going to have to redo everything.
Here’s the good news: I did redo everything, even though it meant rebuilding years’ worth of models in a matter of months. I did get my PhD. I even went on to get a postdoc doing more Pluto research, and parleyed that research into a paper that could change our understanding of the origin of Pluto and Charon forever. I got what I wanted! In the last ten years, I’ve managed to do real science about Pluto, and contributed real things to the literature, just like twenty-year-old me imagined I would. I now know more about Pluto and Sputnik Planitia than almost anyone else on the planet. I’m in the room now, not just looking through the glass; I climbed the mountain and reached Pluto. But everything that happened along the way means I’m not sure if I’m happy at the summit. The victory feels a little hollow — just like how some of my models treat Pluto’s core.
These days, if asked, I tend to joke that I “like Pluto a normal amount.” I say this because it’s funny — I clearly care way more than anyone ever should — and because it’s easier than explaining the truth, which is that I love Pluto, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. Chasing Pluto led me to some of the happiest moments of my life, but it also made me sadder than anything else ever has. Five years ago, I thought my relationship with Pluto was a love story — and it is. The things we love can drive us to our greatest heights, and our lowest points. Sometimes being in love with Pluto felt like drowning, but at its best, it also felt like the first time I’d ever breathed fresh air. As I look back on all ten years of my relationship with Pluto, I can’t tie up the story in a neat bow anymore. Does it have a happy ending or a sad one? Does it have an ending at all?
Here’s one way to look at things: Pluto is gone. New Horizons passed it ten years ago, and all we’ve done since is try to look back the way we came, digging through the past in search of answers. So am I; part of me is looking down at the bottom of the mountain and watching the me that will start to climb, wondering if they should.
But here’s the other way to look at things: Pluto is alive. New Horizons confirmed it was alive ten years ago, and every day since it’s probably changed in ways we’ll never know. Its glaciers are moving, and so are its dunes. If we ever return, Pluto will have made itself anew. Fortunately, so have I. Whether I keep studying Pluto, or move on to a different planet entirely, I’m taking all those disparate skills I’ve learned and building a life out of them, one day at a time. Pluto had some very bad days — like the day it got Sputnik Planitia — that built up the geologic beauty it has now. My PhD is my personal Sputnik Planitia. It changed my life forever, made me what I am, and sometimes it feels like a really big hole. But just like Sputnik Planitia is filled with the brilliant nitrogen ice that makes it shine, the cavity my PhD has carved out of my life is filled with the incredible peers, mentors, and friends I made along the way. Even if I never study it again, I’ll be carrying Pluto with me for the rest of my life; luckily for me, I also get to carry all those people with me too, and everything I’ve learned.
I’ve spent ten years chasing after New Horizons. I wonder what I’ll do next.
Thank you to the New Horizons team, for everything.