Katie Bechtold was a flight controller on NASA’s New Horizons mission, which sent a spacecraft to Pluto. Katie shares the story behind the 9-year epic journey, which gave us the first detailed images of the planet, along with performing scientific experiments that will help us better understand Pluto’s makeup.
Katie Bechtold is a real-time spacecraft flight controller at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory. Katie was part of NASA’s New Horizons mission and helped oversee the spacecraft’s 3 billion mile journey to Pluto, which recently captured the world’s attention. New Horizons will help us better understand Pluto’s composition, geology, atmosphere, and surface temperature. The probe will also check out Pluto’s largest moon, Charon.