If you go What: A showing of “The Year of Pluto” followed by live feeds from NASA headquarters When: 5 p.m. Tuesday Where: University of Colorado’s Fiske Planetarium More info: fiske.colorado.edu

It’s not every college student who can collect a degree and claim a place in history in the process.

Dozens at the University of Colorado have done just that, with a benchmark moment in their lives looming on the near horizon.

The historic NASA flyby of Pluto by the $722 million New Horizons mission will mark its closest approach to the distant dwarf planet at 5:49:57 a.m. MDT Tuesday.

The mission, led by Boulder’s Southwest Research Institute, is providing humankind’s first intimate portrait of Pluto, its five moons and the vast Kuiper belt, sprawling more than a billion miles past Neptune and thought to host thousands of moon-sized objects plus billions of comets.

One of the seven instruments making up the payload of the grand piano-sized spacecraft is the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter, the first science instrument designed, built and operated by students to be part of a planetary mission.

Its name pays tribute to the 11-year-old girl in Oxford, England, who first suggested a name for the celestial body newly discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930. Now, close to a century later, Pluto exploration is one of the most impressive lines on the resumes of numerous CU students.

“It’s almost unexplainable,” said Marcus Piquette, 24, entering his third year as a graduate student in the astrophysical and planetary sciences department at CU. “It’s just incredible to be part of such a professional and experienced team, and see how real science is conducted — especially on the forefront of something that has never been done before. It’s exciting and inspirational.”

He is taking over the graduate lead on the Student Dust Counter from Jamey Szalay, who will complete his graduate degree at CU in December.

Szalay, 27, who has been grooming Piquette as his successor — they are part of the CU team that traveled to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland for Tuesday’s encounter — echoed those sentiments in an email.

“The Student Dust Counter is such a unique instrument in so many ways and being apart of both SDC and the New Horizons mission has truly been a transformative experience,” Szalay said.

“SDC really took student involvement in an interplanetary NASA mission to the next level. Students were involved at every step of the way, from design to software development to testing and building the instrument to operating the instrument once it’s in deep space and everything in between.”

New Horizons co-investigator Mihaly Horanyi, a physics professor at CU’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, termed Tuesday’s flyby an “emotional capstone” for the revolving crew of roughly 30 CU students who have worked on the Student Dust Counter since about 2002.

“They have moved on to have families and kids and busy lives, but I know that all of them will closely follow the encounter and remember their contributions with tremendous pride,” Horanyi said in a university news release. “The encounter is a landmark event along the way to explore the outskirts of the solar system, even beyond Pluto, for possibly decades to come.”

Springboard for many careers

The New Horizons mission launched Jan. 19, 2006, but traces its genesis back roughly a quarter-century. That’s long enough that some CU-trained scientists have been immersed in it much of their adult lives. David James is one.

“Hopefully, I will be sitting back watching (on Tuesday), which is cool,” said James, a 36-year-old professional research assistant at LASP, also in Maryland for the showdown with Pluto.

James worked on the Student Dust Counter as a CU graduate student, and now has the satisfaction of watching his successors guide it through this most crucial phase.

“It has involved multiple generations” of students, James said. “I was the second generation. I was involved in a little bit of the design, and then I was heavily involved in the building and test phase.”

He eventually left LASP for other pursuits — but then returned, where his work on New Horizons and the CU instrument is mostly in what he termed a “mentor” role.

“SDC was a major springboard for a lot of people’s careers, and mine is no different,” James said. “Now, what I do is calibrate other instruments.”

A key aspect of participating as students on a NASA mission, James said, is that individuals’ work is subject to the same level of scrutiny and review as would be applied to science professionals.

“That experience is invaluable,” James said. “I had no idea you could get that kind of experience” at a university. “It’s real world experience. We knew if our instrument misbehaved or performed poorly and we didn’t get good results — a lot of people were counting on us. That was a good motivator for us.”

Unlike the other six instruments on New Horizons, the Student Dust Counter has been turned on and operational since not long after its launch, returning data on the cosmic dust it encounters all along the way, remnants of countless collisions between solar system bodies.

It is hoped that study of the data returned by CU’s instrument — which carries a price tag of about $2 million — will aid researchers in learning more about the origin and evolution not only of our own solar system, but also the formation of planets around other stars.

“What it’s mapping out is how much material is in the outer solar system, out near Pluto,” said CU professor Fran Bagenal, a mission co-investigator who leads the New Horizons particles and plasma team.

“As these objects bump into each other, they grind up and make dust, and that dust slowly spirals in toward the sun, and about 600 tons a day gets dumped into the sun. It takes about a million years for the dust to go from Pluto’s orbital distance all the way into the sun. That may seem a long time, but in the age of the universe it’s pretty short.”

Bagenal said the Student Dust Counter will continue to operate as long as the host spacecraft does so; it has enough power, she said, to last perhaps another 15 to 20 years. The New Horizons team has identified another Kuiper belt object the spacecraft can subsequently fly by, with a slight trajectory adjustment, possibly reaching it in January 2019, Bagenal said. Formal approval from NASA to incorporate that next target is still pending.

“With all missions, you need to achieve your prime objective before they can fund you or allow you to continue with your ongoing mission,” Bagenal said. “We have to get past Pluto and have that be successful, and then we will apply for continuation of that mission. That won’t be before the fall.”

‘One of the great pioneer missions’

As the nine-and-a-half year, 3 billion-mile New Horizons mission zeroes in on Pluto — it will pass a mere 6,200 miles above its surface — it’s naturally a moment of reflection for the CU students and professors who have invested so much of themselves in its success.

“It has launched many careers, hundreds of careers in the space and science business, and that’s just fantastic,” Bagenal said. “Many of them, of course, have stayed in Colorado and worked in the local aerospace industry, in which Colorado is so strong. Others have gone off and done other things. But it’s been great to have them build this instrument.”

James said, “It’s the feeling you get from the chance to be involved in one of the great pioneer missions — which is what New Horizons is, like the Voyagers and the Mariners — returning these first pictures of the outer solar system’s planets. This won’t happen again; there isn’t another (unexplored) planet out there” in our solar system.

Szalay, who traces his involvement in New Horizons and the Student Dust Counter to his arrival at CU five years ago, said: “This couldn’t have been possible without the strong culture of student involvement at LASP, the hard work of all the students involved and the dedication to getting a student-built instrument on New Horizons” exhibited by Horanyi and the mission’s principal investigator, Alan Stern of SwRI.

At the time of the inception of New Horizons, and the launch of work on making the Student Dust Counter a reality, Piquette said, there was no comparable opportunity for planetary-minded college students anywhere else.

Now, after he completes his doctoral degree in 2017 or 2018, Piquette said, “I would hope to someday hop on another mission, either on the science analysis side or the operations side.”

James said he draws great satisfaction from seeing the next wave of students making names for themselves as the uncertain future of human exploration of space frontiers continues to take shape.

“It’s great to know this has been handed on to the next generation,” James said. “It’s in very capable hands.”

Charlie Brennan: 303-473-1327, brennanc@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/chasbrennan