Some commitments are judged less by the day they begin than by the long, quiet stretch they ask for afterward. In one winter week, one long space voyage ended and another began.

NASA's Stardust capsule, carrying cometary and interstellar particles, touched down before dawn in the desert salt flats of the Utah Test and Training Range. The mission had launched on Feb. 7, 1999, and met comet Wild 2 on Jan. 2, 2004. Its project manager put the moment plainly: "Ten years of planning and seven years of flight operations were realized early this morning".

On Jan. 19, 2006, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station aboard an Atlas V rocket. It was the third try, after two attempts earlier that week were foiled by high winds and a power outage. NASA described the destination as "the mysterious planet Pluto almost a decade from now".

What does it take to wait almost a decade?

Much of the answer is designed in before launch. NASA planned to keep New Horizons in electronic hibernation for much of the cruise to Pluto, with operators monitoring it once a year to check out critical systems. The spacecraft was also to send back a beacon signal each week. The flight plan called for an approximately 8-year interplanetary cruise to Pluto. Alan Stern, the New Horizons principal investigator, had compared exploring Pluto to an archeological dig into the history of the outer solar system. Four days into the flight, he wrote that the journey would take "precisely 3462.7 days" and that roughly 0.1% of it was already behind the spacecraft.

A homecoming and a departure

The two missions sit at opposite ends of the same discipline. One shows what years of patient planning look like when they finally land; the New Horizons launch shows that discipline at its first step, with nearly all of the waiting still ahead. A Stardust scientist said, "I have been waiting for this day since the early 1980s".

Long projects are usually remembered by their launch and landing days, yet most of their life happens in between, in hibernation, routine checkups and a signal that simply reports all is well. The harder test of patience may be whether that quiet middle was planned as carefully as the moments people gather to watch.

Sources