“You really do have to think beyond your own lifetime,” he says. But IP has a powerful champion in McNutt, says Opher, who calls him “a fantastic mover and shaker.” According to Bell, McNutt’s superb mentoring abilities will also be critical. “It’s a long shot,” says Bell, who doesn’t have a stake in the project. “Voyager on steroids,” as McNutt calls IP, may stumble at this first hurdle. “It’s myopic if we continue to fund just space weather.” But Merav Opher, an astrophysicist at Boston University, says broadening the field’s boundaries is important. “People are overly scared that one big project will suck out all the funding for the rest of the science we want to do,” says APL space physicist Pontus Brandt, chief scientist on the IP mission concept study. More daunting may be winning hearts and minds in space physics, which is dominated by experts on space weather-the solar flares and coronal mass ejections that can wreak havoc on satellites and power grids. One challenge for McNutt and his colleagues is selling a mission expected to last at least 50 years, requiring three or more generations of scientists. “It’s a space race to the edge of the Solar System!” Buckle up, enthuses Jim Bell, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University, Tempe, and past president of the Planetary Society. It would arrive about 16 years later, in half the time it took Voyager.Ĭhinese scientists are designing a similar mission, called Interstellar Express, that could launch around the same time. The timing would allow it to rendezvous with Jupiter and its potent gravity, which would sling the probe toward interstellar space. A thumbs-up for IP would go a long way toward securing NASA support for a probe that would, ideally, lift off in 2036. The panel is set to begin deliberating next month and deliver its verdict in 2024. His team has delivered a concept study of IP to the decadal survey of solar and space physics, a community exercise led by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that will set the field’s priorities for the next 10 years. Now, McNutt needs to convince a jury of his peers.
“In that sense, Interstellar Probe would be revolutionary.” “We need to get modern instruments out there,” adds Lennard Fisk, a space physicist at the University of Michigan (UM), Ann Arbor. “The only way to see what our fishbowl looks like is to be outside looking in,” McNutt says.
Gazing out from Earth’s perch won’t settle the matter. The Voyager data are so mystifying that some prominent researchers assert the probes haven’t made it to interstellar space yet, perhaps because the bounds of the heliosphere stretch farther than generally thought. “A lot of our preconceived notions didn’t work out too well,” McNutt says. Few expected the spacecraft to survive that long, yet their beguiling observations, still trickling in, have upended many beliefs about the Solar System’s outer limits. McNutt and colleagues at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) have laid out a concept for Interstellar Probe (IP), a $3.1 billion mission to pick up a scientific gauntlet that the two Voyager probes threw down a decade ago after leaving the heliosphere, the Sun’s zone of influence. Now, this veteran of Voyager, one of NASA’s greatest scientific triumphs, wants to wheel his own passion project onto the launchpad. “I said, ‘Where do I sign up before you change your mind?’” Bridge evidently saw a familiar spark in McNutt and invited him to work on a plasma detector for Voyager, the epic mission to the outer planets that began in 1977. Casting around for a research assistantship, he ended up in the office of plasma physicist Herbert Bridge, a towering figure in space science who had overseen the cloak-and-dagger effort to dismantle and ship Harvard University’s cyclotron to New Mexico for the Manhattan Project during World War II. But soon after the young Texan arrived at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the fall of 1975, he found himself on a voyage to the edge of the Solar System-and beyond.
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Download PDFīefore embarking on his Ph.D., Ralph McNutt had never been east of the Mississippi River. A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 377, Issue 6605.
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