Category Archives: Pluto

The Pluto Firestorm Continues

The Issue is NOT Just Planetary Status

Artists’ concept of the New Horizons spacecraft as it flies by Pluto in July, 2015. Credit: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (JHUAPL/SwRI)

I recently got into a fascinating late-evening computer chat with someone who is really incensed that Pluto is no longer a planet. He seemed pretty upset about it, and although not a planetary scientist, seemed cognizant of the IAU’s role in the supposed “demotion” of Pluto a few years ago. Since we just passed the anniversary of that silly vote that led to all the commotion, and in light of my conversational partner’s concerns about this distant world, I thought it a good time to talk about Pluto again.

Essentially, there are two issues:  the definition of planet (and where Pluto fits) and the IAU vote. People get upset about the second issue without understanding the scientific implications of the first. And, whether or not the IAU voted the way it did, there was and is still a healthy conversation going on in the planetary science community about just how we define solar system objects, particularly planets.

In less than a year, we’ll know more about Pluto than at any other time in human history. The New Horizons spacecraft will have just completed a successful flyby of Pluto, looked at Charon (its companion), and its moons (and maybe will have found a few more!). It will be exciting, and as Alan Stern (PI of the New Horizons mission put it on a recent NASA press conference), ” A year from now, we’ll write the textbooks on Pluto.”

Continue reading The Pluto Firestorm Continues

We’re Getting Closer to Pluto!

Worlds in Motion

An animated gif “movie” of Pluto and Charon in motion. This was taken by the New Horizons mission at distance of some 429 to 422 million kilometers (267-262 miles) away. The spacecraft is set to arrive at the Pluto system July 2015.

The New Horizons mission to the outer solar system scored a big one this week with the release of a set of images that clearly — and I DO mean clearly — show Pluto with its largest companion Charon in motion. This is an amazing shot from a huge distance, and the fact that we can “see” the orbital motion of these two places makes them seem somehow more real now. The New Horizons mission has been on the way to Pluto (and beyond) since 2006, with a main goal of imaging and studying the Pluto system, and then sweeping out to see what else it can find in the Kuiper Belt.

I really like what this mission is going to do. Not only is it opening up a dwarf planet for exploration, but it’s going to tell us an incredible amount of cool stuff about the tremendously cold and frigid worlds that exist “out there”. Pluto is on the doorstep of a place in the solar system that likely contains many more worlds of its size and possibly bigger!  This region is a storehouse of materials that exist in pretty much the same chemical state they were in when they formed in the early epochs of solar system history.

Continue reading We’re Getting Closer to Pluto!