Event Horizon 2015

As I grew up, I was reliably informed that there were nine planets. Period. All the space books I collected confirmed this, their relative sizes and rough approximations of what they looked like. I was happy with that; the solar system was secure and busily twirling through space.

My imagination had a place to roam and for many years, nothing occurred to change this view. I was an avid follower of the space programme, but despite NASA sending probes to the closer planets and showing a succession of fuzzy photos, I was still relatively unmoved. Even seeing the piece of moon rock at Liverpool Museum had made little impression, to me, it had just seemed like a lump of coalite. It wasn't until July 1976, when Viking 1 & 2 soft landed on Mars, did things look exciting again. I fully expected the headlines to be lit up with the discovery of 'little green men' on Mars, but after a while, the probes did not uncover anything of any major significance. Skylab fell out of the sky, Salyut went up and the commerce of space increased. The space shuttle began to make regular journeys into space and despite the horrendous Challenger incident in 1986, continued for the next few decades.

Fast forward then to 1996 and the comet Halle Bop became visible in the skies above Britain and for several days, I watched it eerily arc across the evening sky, its twin tails glowing. Shortly after, my daughter was born and my focus turned away from space.

The Mars rover Sojourner touched down in 1997, but again, revealed little to gain my full attention. By 2003, when Spirit and Opportunity arrived on Mars, my son had been born, so life had become even busier. I watched with admiration as they trundled across the parched and arid landscape at the promising missions. However it wasn't until 2011, when Curiosity blasted into the headlines in flamboyant style, that I really took note.

By then, the blog was in full effect and as a consequence of a joke blog posting about the landing; we made first contact with Bill Everatt, who invited me and Woodstock to be interviewed on his Underground Edition show.

After Curiosity’s spectacular 'skycrane' landing and consequent photos and tweets, I took a more active interest again, in what NASA was up to. There were several probes and other missions on the go, the Cassini mission and the Titan probe were sending back amazing photos of the gas giants and their necklace of moons and humanity’s vision of the system was becoming clearer and more exotic by the week.

Today, I feel privileged to have been born in the middle of the space race, I have seen man walk on the moon and the first manmade object leave the solar system. I can see the surface of the moon and Mars from a laptop and receive tweeted messages from the International Space Station and a remote rover on a distant planet.  The Dawn probe recently made orbit around the protoplanet Ceres and visited the giant asteroid Vesta. The Rosetta probe’s lander Philae has woken up and is reporting the possible practicality of micro-organic life on the body of the comet and in just seven days, the Horizon probe will scream through the Pluto system and show us finally, what the ninth planet actually looks like.

This for me is a massively important time, with so much astronomical activity and discoveries going on. Poor Pluto has been relegated from full planet status to dwarf planet and then reinstated as a circumbinary planetoid with its moon Charon. Coupled with this is the discovery of a ring of odd moons dancing around the tiny distant world and Horizons cameras slowly revealing strange surface features on the cold surface, I’m expecting a big reveal next week.

With Pluto in the bag, the next step will be to see a manned landing on Mars and with preparations already underway, albeit in the planning stage, I’m hoping I can still be around when man takes his second small step. I’m thinking it may be an even larger leap for mankind this time.