On July 14, 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft, one of the most advanced ever built, is scheduled to fly by Pluto to take the very first detailed images of the dwarf planet. After nine years and 3 billion miles, we will finally get a close look at this strange, icy world, but only if the craft can survive the final, treacherous leg of its journey, which could take it through a dangerous field of debris. If it does, New Horizons is poised to make dramatic new discoveries, not just about Pluto, but about the vast realm of icy bodies lurking beyond Neptune, relics of the earliest days of the solar system’s formation. Back on Earth, the planetary scientists who have spent decades working on this mission anxiously await a signal from their spacecraft. Our cameras will be there to witness the moment. If all goes well, we’ll see Pluto’s mysterious surface in unprecedented detail and learn new secrets about other alien worlds at the far limits of our solar system.
This book is iconic to people of a certain generation. I personally wish that I had a copy. We sat in the school library transfixed by it for days. It really fuelled the imagination with it's ludicrousness but it was a National Geographic book so us kids took it as fact that these things could really exist.
This book is iconic to people of a certain generation. I personally wish that I had a copy. We sat in the school library transfixed by it for days. It really fuelled the imagination with it's ludicrousness but it was a National Geographic book so us kids took it as fact that these things could really exist.
I bet my mom saved our copy. I'm going to have to check next time I'm up there. But yeah - it is funny how for our generation there were certain things that EVERYONE had. This book, apparently, one of them.
Am I the only one that takes issue with the term " Dwarf " planet? We live in a PC society, Pluto may sue if we keep this up! Planets have rights too! Just cause its a " Dwarf " planet does not mean it has no rights!
Then again I constantly get confused with media reports with the ISS and ISIS. Keep asking myself why NASA would do such things!
1KB/sec download? Who around here is old enough to remember when life was like that? I slowly raise my hand in shame. Downloading a movie, off bbs sites in a month, just one movie. If you dont know what BBS is, well yes there was a time when the internet did not exist!
I tried and failed, Pluto is a planet.
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Pluto's declassification as a planet has more to do with than just it's size. A lot more.
(I'm sure I'm going to get a bit of this wrong, and one of the better science minds will correct me, but this is how I understand it, and I'm fairly certain it's pretty close)
First of all, it doesn't orbit the way the other planets do. All the other planets share pretty much the same orbit as each other. Just wider/bigger as you move further away from the sun. Different speeds too obviously, but I'm not sure that matters much. There is a reason for that.
When the solar system formed, it was a cloud of dust and debris spinning around the center together. The sun and planets coalesced from this cloud, which is why they have similar shaped orbits. The fact that Pluto's is so far from these orbits, both at angle and shape (it actually crosses Neptune's orbit for a brief period in it's loop and is closer to the sun for some time than Neptune, last crossing was 1979-2000 give or take) shows that it wasn't part of this same cloud. That it probably came from elsewhere, either an escaped moon from inside the system, or perhaps from the Oort cloud, and got trapped orbiting the sun.
Now I guess one could argue that to be a planet the fact you are from this original cloud when the system formed shouldn't matter, but I guess that's what the guys in charge get to decide. The fact it, it is more like the definition we have of an orbiting satellite, and less like the definition we have of a planet.
As far as the ring of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, well they do satisfy the orbit rule, but I'm sure they don't fall in the classification for many other reasons. One being size. Probably many others, which make a certain amount of sense considering it is an asteroid belt. It's more rock and debris, than an actual planet. Of course, at one time it may have been a planet, that's a popular theory. But we don't know that for sure yet.
Pluto may fit some of the criteria, and some of the objects in the belt may satisfy other criteria. But they don't satisfy all the criteria. You need an orbiting body which satisfies the criteria of both their 'strong points'.
Primary reason is it hasn't cleared its neighbourhood of other objects I believe. Planet has to dominate its orbit. Other planets will actually eject objects that come too close to them through gravitational sorcery.
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Primary reason is it hasn't cleared its neighbourhood of other objects I believe. Planet has to dominate its orbit. Other planets will actually eject objects that come too close to them through gravitational sorcery.
That's another good point. They even mentioned in the video that Charon doesn't orbit Pluto so much as a spot behind Pluto, or they orbit each other.
I did a ton of reading after this Pluto craze, and there's some interesting history to the discovery (and following classification) of planets/objects in our system.
Ceres was initially called the fifth planet. After that, we began discovering larger members of the asteroid belt to the point that Jupiter was once considered the 20th (!) planet orbiting our snazzy star.
It's funny that everyone makes a stink about Pluto, but Ceres gets no love.
Ceres is (sort of) to the asteroid belt as Pluto is to the Kuiper Belt*
* The Kuiper Belt is also far more massive than the asteroid belt, so let's say "to scale". Fun fact, many scientists and space geeks have theorized there may be 20, 30, or even a ridiculous number of dwarf planets further out but still under the influence of our son. I believe Pluto is around 40-45AU (astronomical unit = earths distance from the sun); speculation has placed planets at 1000-1500AU.. Really far out, man.
Check out Sedna and others from this image if you're bored.
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I think because most of us who were space heads as kids, were taught Pluto was a planet. So it has a sort of child like sentiment to it. Declassifying it, is kinda like letting go of Santa Claus. They stuff you are talking about, while similar, was already changed by the time we started learning, so it carries no emotional attachment.
NASA’s New Horizons mission has found evidence of exotic ices flowing across Pluto’s surface, at the left edge of its bright heart-shaped area. New close-up images from the spacecraft’s Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) reveal signs of recent geologic activity, something scientists hoped to find but didn’t expect.
“We’ve only seen surfaces like this on active worlds like Earth and Mars,” said mission co-investigator John Spencer of SwRI. “I'm really smiling.”
