NASA’s New Horizon probe has been heading to the tiny demoted planet Pluto at the very edge of our solar system for nine years now, and last week the space agency reported the spacecraft has begun its final approach phase to Pluto, resulting in the first flyby on July 14.
Everyone who grew up in the middle of the 20th century was taught that Pluto, which wasn’t discovered until 1930, was the last of the nine planets. Now, poor thing, it has been pushed down to dwarf planet status, and it may be that there are other objects out there in the Kuiper Belt of asteroids that are just as big as it.
In fact, when New Horizon was launched in 2006, Pluto very much was still in the pantheon, and the mission was described as our first robotic visit to the last unexplored planet in our system.
Unlike most extraterrestrial missions to parts unknown, this one isn’t being managed out of JPL right here in La Canada Flintridge, though the local lab is providing some of the navigational know-how. Back in the cost-cutting ’90s, other Pluto missions were scrapped as being too pricey, and this proposal out of Johns Hopkins and the Southwest Research Institute was chosen instead.
But the small JPL connection does still provide an irony, since Caltech runs the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and it was Caltech astronomy professor Mike Brown who did the research that dealt the fatal blow to Pluto’s planetary status.
You can even join 20,000 others and follow Brown on Twitter: @plutokiller. Here’s what he sent out to his fans last Saturday: “just did a BBC interview about New Horizons. Which is kinda like interviewing John Wilkes Booth about the Gettysburg Address, I think.”
But some very much disagree with the downgrade to dwarf by the International Astronomical Union. New Horizon’s principal investigator published the piece “Unabashedly Onward to the Ninth Planet” on the mission’s website. And where is the arithmetic that describes what’s a planet? (Well, adding up the two plus two that makes it just a big asteroid, answer the killers.)
Getting to the edge of our solar system is incredible, and fascinating science will come from it. Touchingly, New Horizon is carrying an ounce of the ashes of astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered the frozen, far thing, however we categorize it.
