I have to admit to being taken a little off guard the other day when my son Will told me about the close-up pictures of Pluto that were being released and shown on television. Had one of our scientific space exploration missions actually reached that remote spot? Apparently, yes...
New Horizons is an American space probe, aimed at exploring Pluto, its moons, and the Kuiper Belt of which it is a part. It was designed and constructed through a collaboration between Southwest Research Institute and the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University. NASA managed the mission itself, which began with a January, 2006 launch, a mid-course fly-by with Jupiter, and...finally, this year, its arrival at Pluto just a couple of days ago. The photo of Pluto pictured above is from July 14. New Horizons made its closest approach to what I still tend to call our "ninth planet" (although officially it's been demoted to the status of "dwarf planet") yesterday, taking surprisingly detailed pictures of its surface...which indicates that Pluto is geologically active and possibly could have an interior of water. You can get access to more New Horizons Pluto pictures through this link: NASA Pluto Mission Website. The probe also took an incredible picture of Pluto's largest of its known five moons, named Charon, which you can also view on NASA's website...
The Kuiper Belt, which rings our Solar System beyond Neptune's orbit with myriad objects including comets and dwarf planets, may well contain life. Pluto has turned out to be far from the dormant ball of ice it has been portrayed as over the years, although I've heard that, should it leave its orbit and head toward the sun, it would most likely form a tail like that of a comet. I heard this watching Public Television's Nova program about the New Horizons Pluto mission, which was shown last night...
When I was a kid, my dad bought me a comic book that contained, along with other tidbits, the stories of the vision and construction of the Mount Palomar Observatory in Southern California and the discovery of Pluto by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 (at Lowell Observatory in Arizona). There was a lot of national pride because "we" discovered the ninth planet, although the subsequent discovery decades later of the Kuiper Belt, in which Pluto resides, may prove to be much more significant...
The New Horizons probe will now continue beyond Pluto and further into the Kuiper Belt. I'm not sure exactly how useful it will be beyond this point, but I wouldn't dare to underestimate the ingenuity and imagination of the scientists and engineers who have been behind this project...
