With New Horizons Spacecraft a Year Away, What We Know About Pluto 128
An anonymous reader writes In one year, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will reach Pluto after over 8 years of travel. "Not only did we choose the date, by the way, we chose the hour and the minute. And we're on track," says Alan Stern, the principal investigator for NASA's Pluto-Kuiper Belt Mission. As the New Horizons spacecraft gets closer to Pluto, we will begin getting the clearest images we've ever gotten. "A great deal of planning went into this mission. But in case you're wondering, the New Horizons team did not plan for Pluto to be downgraded to a dwarf planet in the same year as the launch. That didn't change anything for Alan Stern. Some planetary scientists still dispute Pluto's planet status, and Stern says he'll always think of Pluto as a planet. Either way, it's a distant realm ripe for exploration. Scientists don't know exactly what they will see there. And that's the exciting part. 'When we first sent missions to Jupiter, no one expected to find moons that would have active volcanoes. And I could go down a long list of how often I've been surprised by the richness of nature,' Stern says."
Re:We know it's a Goddamned planet (Score:5, Informative)
You must have a really out-of-date source for your sizes. Mercury is 2440 km, you got that correct. Pluto is a less-than-half 1184 km. 5 moons, including our own, are larger than Pluto and smaller than Mercury.
Size is most definitely one of the points here.
Re:Anyone have Cliff Notes? (Score:4, Informative)
Besides, we were warned Europa is off limits
Re:We know it's a Goddamned planet (Score:2, Informative)
Good news! The Dawn probe [wikipedia.org] recently did a flyby of Vesta [wikipedia.org] on its way to Ceres [wikipedia.org].