To Pluto and Beyond!

All of the (now eight!) planets in our solar system have been visited by space probes.  Pluto was still a planet when NASA decided it was about time to pay it a visit and send a spacecraft on a long journey to the uncharted, outer edge of our solar system.

On January 19, 2006, NASA launched the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt (the region beyond Neptune swarming with thousands of small, icy objects).  Seven months later, Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet.

The New Horizons spacecraft will travel through our solar system for nine years, covering almost 5 billion kilometers (3 billion miles) before it finally reaches Pluto on July 14, 2015.  If all goes well, New Horizons will then venture out further into the Kuiper Belt and take a look at a few more icy dwarfs from 2018 to 2022. That’s a long way away.

New Horizons carries instruments on board which will photograph the surface of these icy bodies, determine what they are made of, how cold they are and what their atmosphere is like.

So what do we hope to learn from New Horizons?

Pluto has always been a little different. For one thing, except Uranus, the other planets have poles that point roughly up and out of their orbit planes. Both Pluto and Uranus rotate on their sides….did something tip them over?

Also, we know that Pluto has three moons. Two of Pluto’s moons, Nix and Hydra are tiny but one of Pluto’s moons, Charon, is more than half the size of Pluto! Charon is the largest moon compared to its planet of any moon in the solar system. Not only is Charon big, relative to Pluto, its very close – 20 times closer to Pluto than our moon is to us. Why is Charon so close to Pluto and how did it get there?

Pluto is a cold ball of rock and ice covered with a thin, frosty atmosphere which slowly escapes into space. Is Pluto similar to a comet?

And, what’s it really like in the cold, distant Kuiper Belt? Just how many dwarf planets are there?

Scientists hope that by studying these distant bodies we will gain an understanding of how the solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago. Sit back, relax and stayed tuned. Dwarf planet history is about to be made….starting in about eight years!