Pluto: The Next Frontier

The New Horizons spacecraft will skim dwarf planet Pluto on July 14th at 7:49:57 a.m. EDT after nine and a half years of rushing through the Solar System at speeds of up to 83,000 km per hour [relative to the Sun]. You can follow the encounter live through NASA's TV webpage. Figure 1. Pluto as seen 4 million kilometers away by the New Horizons spacecraft. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI Why should we even care? Back in 2001, when the viability of the mission was under review, Pluto was the only of nine planets in our neighborhood that was still left unexplored. In 2006, after a long discussion at the International Astronomical Union (IAU), following the discovery of multiple Pluto-like planets in recent years, a new category was created for spherical bodies that haven't cleared their orbit around the Sun of asteroids, the so called "dwarf planets". Officially, 5 dwarf planets have been recognized by the IAU: Ceres (currently being visited by spacecraft DAWN, and residing between Mars and Jupiter), Pluto, Haumea, Makemake and Eris. Several more similar dwarf planetary bodies are waiting in line to be officially labeled as dwarf planets, and no visits are currently planet for these. VISITING THE NEIGHBORHOOD A trove of unexpected treasures have been discovered in our solar neighborhood, the Solar System, over the past 40 years through unmanned missions. Jupiter, the largest planet and a gas giant, received its first mechanical guest in 1973: Pioneer 10. It discovered Jupiter's...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news