New images of Pluto are about to reveal the true face of the dwarf planet
Pluto is a long, long, way away.
Depending on where it is on its journey around the sun it’s between 2.6 and 4.7 billion miles from earth. That’s 30 to 50 times further from the sun than our planet.
And that’s what makes Nasa’s New Horizon’s mission to visit it so significant. Though one of the most familiar sounding objects in the Solar System Pluto is nothing but a fuzzy blob. The best pictures of it are mainly guess work, what it is made of, no body knows.
If it hadn’t been the first object of its size and distance to have been discovered it would never have been in school textbooks as one of the “nine” classical planets in our Solar System.
Starting in the late seventies new telescopes and techniques revealed large numbers of objects orbiting at the same distance from the sun and some nearly as big as Pluto. Its an area of the Solar System now known as the Kuiper belt. It’s why in 2006, Pluto officially lost its planetary stripes and was busted down to “dwarf ” status.
But its relegation doesn’t make it any less interesting. Scientists know next to nothing about what objects in the Kuiper belt look like, or what they’re made of, and how they came to be there. As the biggest known, a trip to Pluto has been on scientists’ wish list for a long time.
They would have liked the New Horizons probe to go into orbit around Pluto. But in order to get there in anything less than decades New Horizons has had to travel faster than any spacecraft launched at the time. And because Pluto is so small it can’t use the planetoid’s gravity to slow it down. So it’s simply going to fly past at 14 km per second and hope it can gather as much data as possible.
The first pictures of the probe’s approach to Pluto will start emerging this week. But it is still 200 million kilometres away so they won’t be very good. But by July – it makes its closest approach on July 14th – the true face of Pluto will finally be revealed.
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