GMU Professor Is Part Of Pluto Exploration Team

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An astronomy professor at George Mason University is helping to retrieve and analyze data from the first up-close views of Pluto, the dwarf planet being visited this week by a NASA space probe.

The probe, called New Horizons, passed within 7,700 miles of the planet’s surface early Tuesday after a journey of more than 3 billion miles, according to media reports. But NASA will not officially confirm the close encounter until Tuesday night.

GMU professor Michael Summers is among the team of experts working this week at New Horizons’ mission operations center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Columbia, Md. This week’s flyby of Pluto is the culmination of 16 years of work for Summers and others involved in the New Horizons project, according to a story on GMU’s website.

In the story, Summers talks about what scientists hope to find out about our solar system’s outermost planet with this week’s discoveries. And he asks everyone to check out NASA’s website to see the latest images of Pluto captured by New Horizons.