BackAhead of the Pluto fly-by, the complicated history of the former planet
As NASA's spacecraft New Horizons approaches Pluto, here's a look at the history of the former planetfrom its discovery to how it eventually became a non-planet
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New Delhi: My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Nine Planets. This is one of the first mnemonics most kids learnt in school until Pluto was declared a dwarf planet and the first lesson about our solar system became much more complicated.
Scientists, however, were hungry to know more about Pluto and in January 2006, the US space agency National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) New Horizons spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida aboard the Atlas V rocket.
On Tuesday, the New Horizons unmanned spacecraft will carry out the world’s first fly-by past Pluto after travelling more than nine years and three billion miles. The NASA team leading the mission has already gathered some data and photos from the camera onboard the spacecraft and there are a few things we already know, such as the fact that Pluto is red, like Mars.
The spacecraft will fly past Pluto at 30,800 miles per hour with seven scientific instruments which will try to find out what is the planet’s atmosphere is made of, what the surface of Pluto looks like, the kind of geological structures present there, and how particles ejected from the sun interact with Pluto’s atmosphere.
The spacecraft will then fly by icy bodies in the Kuiper Belt, a region of the Solar System beyond the planets, more than a billion kilometres beyond Neptune’s orbit.
Describing the importance of the mission, principal investigator of the New Horizons mission Alan Stern said in Science journal, “These will become the farthest worlds ever explored, ushering in a new era of discovery. Although information from previous planetary probes has helped scientists understand the origin of the inner rocky planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) and the gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune), as well as their moons, this will be the first opportunity to undertake a close-up study of the dwarf planets that are so common beyond Neptune."
As the spacecraft approaches Pluto, more than 3.6 billion miles away from the sun, here is a look at the history of the former planet from its discovery to how it eventually became a non-planet:
•1930: Clyde Tombaugh, an American astronomer, discovered Pluto by use of a new astronomic technique of photographic plates combined with a blink microscope. His finding was confirmed by several other astronomers, and on 13 March 1930, the discovery of Pluto was publicly announced.
•1930: The planet is named Pluto as suggested by Venetia Phair, an 11-year old girl in the UK.
•1951: Dutch astronomer Gerard Kuiper predicted the existence of a belt of icy objects beyond the gas giant Neptune which was later named Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt or just Kuiper belt. This belt would be home to trillions of new celestial objects and would later be responsible for the downgrading of Pluto’s status as a planet.
•1992: The discovery of a new faint object in the outer solar system, 1992 QB1, moving beyond the orbit of Neptune is reported. The1992 QB1 was considered the first detection of a member of the Kuiper belt.
•2005: The discovery of the Kuiper belt led to the discovery of other celestial objects, the most prominent being the July 2005 discovery of an object that was initially thought to be about 10% larger than Pluto (later it was found to be slightly smaller than Pluto). The object which was later named Eris, which orbits the sun about once every 560 years and had a small moon named Dysnomia.
•2006: The discovery of Eris—orbiting the sun and similar in size to Pluto, then the ninth planet of our solar system—forced astronomers to consider whether Eris should be classified as the 10th planet. Instead, in 2006, the International Astronomical Union created a new class of objects called dwarf planets, in which Pluto, Eris and the asteroid Ceres were all put together.
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