Tomorrow a little space probe, travelling at 45,000 kph (or 1 about million km a day) will whizz past Pluto and its largest attentant moon Charon. At its nearest point it will be at an altitude of 12,500 km above the target, robotically taking photos and readings. It is nearly 5,000,000,000 km from earth.
An amazing piece of planning, engineering and project management, 9 years in the making. Great it is science fact rather than science fiction.
Tomorrow, the Greek crisis may or may not be solved, stocks maybe up, maybe down, those quartely results may still be a challenge or that project may be causing all sorts of stress at the office.
However if all goes well on Tuesday, we will know more about Pluto, another object in our solar system, than in the whole of human history. Our collective human efforts, will have just achieved yet another milestone, expanding our knowledge of the universe and our place in it.
So whatever your job, where ever you are, it is worth sparing a thought for this plucky project and probe.
We are afterall linked and part of this together. In our own way we have all enabled this to happen, playing a part however large or small as part of society.
It is something we should all feel proud about and hopefully celebrate with the engineering teams on Wednesday.
