The solar system was a cramped, provincial place in May 1989, and so was the Italian restaurant in downtown Baltimore where Alan Stern exhorted a dozen of his colleagues to join him on an improbable mission: Persuade NASA to send a probe to Pluto. At the time, even most astronomers weren't interested in this weird, tiny orb on the fringe of the solar system. "I was skeptical," says Fran Bagenal, then a graduate student at MIT, who was present at the meal. "Sending a mission to Pluto seemed pretty uninteresting at the time."
While Bagenal picked at her pasta, Stern waxed on about Pluto's charms. He explained his research, analyzing how the solar wind—the continuous flow of particles exhaled by the sun—blows gases from Pluto's surface like seeds from a dandelion. "I always liked to study things that were somewhat offbeat," Stern says. Pluto definitely fits—a world smaller than Earth's ...
