Meet the Lancashire scientist who played key role in 22-year Pluto mission

Wilfred Spencer, a local historian and librarian at Nelson and Colne College, was so determined that his son wouldn’t miss out that he asked a colleague who owned a telescope to let the youngster use it.

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“I was really interested and I’d read all of Patrick Moore’s books. Some people my father worked with lived on a farm on the moors south of Colne. They had a telescope and I remember going up there trying to get a look at Saturn,” says John.

“And it was terrible. We never got to see anything. It’s not easy doing astronomy in Lancashire,” he laughs.

But little did Wilfred know that his son’s passion would see him helping to make history one day.

The New Horizons spacecraft is the fastest man-made object ever to leave Earth, travelling at ten times the speed of a bullet (or over one million miles a day).

Unfortunately its amazing speed meant the spacecraft was unable to land on the planet itself, hence the need to gather photographs, measurements and data during a two-hour window as it passed within 8,000 miles of the surface, before going on to explore further out into space.

The mission marked the conclusion of Nasa’s quest to explore every planet in the solar system, starting with Venus in 1962.

John had been working on the Pluto mission from the start – 22 years, in fact – having been invited by Alan Stern, the mission leader.

“It took years to plan what exactly we were going to do in those couple of days, so I worked a lot on figuring out where was the best place to point the spacecraft to get the best information. I was also working on determining whether it would be safe to fly through the Pluto system.

“We had some concerns that we may run into debris, so we were taking long exposure pictures looking for any new tiny moons that would be dangerous. That took over my life for a few months.”

John was also leading the search for asteroid-like objects beyond Pluto and indeed two were found and deemed worthy of further investigation.

“We found a couple of objects that are close enough to our path, so we can change course to fly at close range to one of them. We’ll decide which one in the next few weeks and set a course for a fly-by. There are hundreds of thousands of objects like this in the Kuiper Belt. We think these are left over building blocks from the solar system. That’s why we’re very excited to see one of them close up.”

Timing was crucial for the Pluto mission and the spacecraft got to the planned point within 70 seconds of the schedule after a nine-and-a-half year journey.

“That is absolutely amazing. We can’t do anything in real time, it’s all four-and-half times the speed of light, so everything has to be simulated here on Earth. A couple of years ago we practised the whole observancy process on the spacecraft, taking it through all the manoeuvres and taking pictures of nothing just to make sure it could do all we wanted it to. So we were pretty confident by the time we got there that we had it.

Even a computer crash prior to the mission failed to ruffle the poised scientists.

“It took a few days to get it back up again and we had left time in the schedule to be able to recover from that,” John said. “It was exciting, but we were pretty confident.

“Tuesday last week was an unbelievable day. I’ve never had a day like that before. I had one hour’s sleep before coming into work. We had a ceremonial countdown to the moment of truth because we had no communication with the spacecraft at that point.

“It was a huge celebration, the day was full of press briefings and in the evening we got the first indication that the spacecraft had survived the encounter and was going to be able to tell us about what it had found.

“That was an emotional moment at about 9pm on Tuesday evening. We got the signal back from the spacecraft telling us that the data had been recorded. I didn’t actually cry. But when I heard the information from the data operation people that we’d got the expected amount of data, I got teary. I hugged my wife Jane and anyone I knew who was close by.”

So how did a boy from Colne become a history-making Nasa scientist. “Well, I was very lucky,” says John, whose sister Frances still lives in East Lancashire.

“I went to Lord Street Juniors, Colne Grammar and Nelson and Colne College. I got a really great education and I’m still grateful to the teachers who taught me the basics of science.”

John wanted to study astronomy when he left college. He also got an offer from Cambridge, which didn’t have an astronomy course.

“I thought I’d do physics, but then I fell in love with geology and did that instead. I think at that point I was giving up on the dream of becoming an astronomer.”

But, nevertheless, he applied for a summer programme in Houston, Texas, working on information sent back from the Apollo mission. “And I fell in love with it all over again.”

So he applied to the University of Arizona, got a Phd in planetary science and met his wife. He then worked for 12 years at the Lowell Observatory where Pluto was discovered.

He lived at the observatory, at the site where Clyde Tombaugh, the man who discovered Pluto, had lived. While there he was asked by Stern to take part in the Pluto mission due to his experience with similar missions.

His next project is in Pasadena , California, to plan Nasa’s next big mission to Europa, the sixth closest moon of Jupiter.

“It will be another 20 years before we get data from that and I’ll be pretty old by then,” he laughs.

No journalist can possibly interview a top space scientist without asking about aliens. Does he believe they exist?

“We have no evidence at this point. But the driving motive behind space exploration is how we managed to get here. It’s extraordinary that we’re here on this planet when we see no evidence of life anywhere else around us.

“It’s something we’re very interested in, that’s why we want to go back to Europa because we think it has a huge ocean underneath the icy surface where life could exist. I’m also very interested in Enceladus, one of the moons of Saturn which could have water below its surface. If there is life on those places it will be very simple life.

“The universe is a very very big place. We know there are billions of planets and some have a temperature like the Earth and may have oceans. We don’t think that there’s anything special about the Earth in that sense. So life may have evolved and who knows how far it may have gone. It’s one of the biggest questions we ask, but we can’t answer it yet.”

John is keen to share his experience with as many people as possible so will be talking at the ACE Centre, Nelson On Friday, September 25 . Tickets are being offered at £2 each for the presentation.

• For further information or to book, contact The ACE Centre on 01282 661080 or check out the website at www.acecentre.co.uk