Flyby could unmask strange, elusive Pluto
The New Horizons spacecraft, speeding through the solar system at about 30,000 mph, carries an array of highly sensitive instruments and sophisticated electronics. It also carries a more archaic cargo: an American postage stamp.
The 1991 stamp reads, “Pluto: Not Yet Explored.”
New Horizons is about to render that proclamation obsolete. Tuesday morning, the ship is expected to become the first to fly close to Pluto, breezing past at a distance of only 7,750 miles — qualifying as kissing distance to a planet that will then lie 3 billion miles from Earth.
Never before has a spaceship visited Pluto, the last member of the classical nine planets to receive an ambassador from Earth. So distant that scientists still don’t know exactly how big it is — even the Hubble Space Telescope has taken only blurry photos of it. The hope is Pluto will be revealed in all its glorious weirdness.
“It’s sort of like we’re on the Starship Enterprise coming into a new solar system,” says Paul Schenk, a member of the New Horizons scientific team and a planetary scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. “It looks so strange, we really can’t make any sense of it.”
Even the slightly fuzzy snapshots New Horizons clicked off on its way to Pluto have astounded and baffled scientists. There’s the line of dark polka dots on Pluto’s horizon and the bright “heart” nearby. Then there’s the dark stretch at the north pole of Charon, Pluto’s largest moon. “We’re stumped,” Schenk says. Scientists working on the $720 million mission brush aside Pluto’s official demotion, in 2006, from full-fledged planet to humbler “dwarf planet.” Regardless of rigid nomenclature, Pluto merits attention as a solar-system citizen completely different from both the rocky-planets club that includes Earth and Mars and the so-called gas giants, a grouping that includes Jupiter and Uranus.
“Pluto is a whole new kind of planet,” says New Horizons scientist Mike Summers of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. “This is something that we’re just not familiar with, and yet this kind of planet may dominate … the solar system,” at least in sheer numbers.
“No matter how much we plan, we are going to see things that are unexplained and that blow our minds,” Summers says. “To see this after so much effort going into the mission is just awesome.”
Never before has a spaceship visited Pluto, which is the last member of the classical nine planets to receive an ambassador from Earth. ... The hope is Pluto will be revealed in all its glorious weirdness.