Washington University professor and co-investigator on the science team in NASA’s New Horizons mission Bill McKinnon is excited to see what comes next for the project, which in July captured the best-quality images of Pluto to date.

The mission’s ongoing goal is to report back both visual and quantitative data to scientists, which can then be used to learn new information about the dwarf planet, its moon Charon and the Kuiper Belt as a whole.

McKinnon and University alumna Kelsi Singer are both involved with the mission, which they hope will continue to provide exciting data until its conclusion in fall 2016.

For McKinnon, who has been involved with the mission since its inception, the pictures and data, which the spacecraft captured on its fly-by of the planet on July 14, represent the culmination of over a decade of preparation and expectation.

“This community has been working for a long time to try to get a mission to this final frontier,” McKinnon said. “Our team won a competition for a mission to Pluto in 2001. We built it in record time and launched it in 2006. We reached Jupiter for a gravity assist in 2007 and have been in flight since then until last July, at which point we finally reached Pluto.”

The mission was a resounding success, providing both striking images and information from the dwarf planet.

“We learned a lot of new and interesting things,” McKinnon said. “I guess the best way to summarize it would be to say that two things had to happen; the spacecraft had to work as we planned it, which it did, but also Pluto had to cooperate. It had to turn out to be interesting and photogenic, and it certainly was both.”

Kelsi Singer, a former student of McKinnon’s who, after earning her doctorate from Washington University, went on to join the New Horizons team almost a year ago, noted that while the data has been collected, the mission is far from over.

“We don’t have very much of the data registered at all,” she said. “So we’ll be getting all of the best data and images back in the coming months. It’ll take almost a year to get everything back, simply because it’s so far away and the data rates are so low. So we are actually just scratching the surface of what we can learn about Pluto.”

From what has already been discovered, however, McKinnon can already derive a sense of satisfaction and wonder.

“You always expect to see something new and interesting when you visit a new world for the first time,” he said. “We always say things along the lines of ‘the stuff that we can’t predict will be the most interesting,’ but the fact that it ends up being true doesn’t make it any less incredible.”