NASA waiting to hear back from the New Horizons probe on its way to Pluto. It was launched before iPhones were around, Windows XP was still being sold, Boris Yeltsin was still breathing, many people thought Hillary Clinton was going to be the next Democratic Presidential nominee, if not the next POTUS, you could buy new Pontiac, Saturn, Mercury, Saab, and Hummer cars, dial up internet was still a thing, Bob Barker is the host of The Price is Right, most Americans had never heard of Fukishima, and Kim Jong-il was still running North Korea, to give you an idea of how much things have changed in the years since then.
So January 15th will give us a chance to see Pluto as we approach. I love that we'll be able to track its progress as well. We'll finally get to see Pluto with our own eyes, and up close (in July we'll get the closest view). This is something I have wanted to see for a very long time.
Ha! You blew your cover by inadvertently saying "with our own eyes". No human eyes will see Pluto, only machine eyes. You've done a fair job of passing yourself off as an organic up till now, with a fake background story and all, but the jig is up, tin man.
Thanks for the heads up. This dropped off my radar... figuratively speaking. Here's a bit more on the passage of time: The Girl Who Named Pluto.
Oh, and I've not seen it mentioned anywhere, but there's a piece of Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne onboard the New Horizons probe. After he won the X-Prize NASA called him up and asked for a piece of it to put on the probe before it was launched. There's video of Rutan talking about it, and he can barely hold back his tears as describes getting the call.
I've been following it closely over the last 9 years. I was surprised they would ever get it funded and launched. IIRC, two earlier versions were canceled and originally there were going to be two probes so they could see both sides of Pluto. As for Pluto not being a planet. Who knows. Classifications can change. Personally I think the criteria they used to downgrade it is ridiculous
We can call it a planet because it squeaked in before we knew better. It's planet-fathered in. Still we will finally get to see Pluto. I hope there is a giant abandoned alien base on it to freak us out. Wouldn't that kick-start a space race?????
There's a novel, sort of about that, called Charon's Ark. In it, a plane goes missing, and winds up on Pluto, which turns out to be a kind of a cosmic zoo created by aliens. It was certainly the first thing which popped into my head when that Malaysian flight went missing. If New Horizons spots it on Pluto, I'm totally going to be freaked out.
Something I didn't know about New Horizons, and its a historic first which is unlikely to be repeated in our lifetimes: New Horizons is carrying some of Clyde Tombaugh's ashes. It will probably be a very long time before a probe carries the remains of a dwarf planet's discoverer to that planet. Its a shame they couldn't have afforded the weight necessary to be able to fire Tombaugh's remains at Pluto as the probe flew by.
To be fair, it's from 71 million miles away. That's about half the distance from Earth to Mars, so that's a pretty good shot with a camera. We'll see awesome images in July.
Animated gif of Charon orbiting Pluto : http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a15299/new-horizons-pluto-surface/ Either Pluto's tilted on its side or Charon is in a polar orbit, from the way the gif looks.
It's interesting the extent to which Charon's gravity influences Pluto. They are both in wobbly orbits around a point that sits between the two. Technically, this is also true of the Earth/Moon or Earth/Sun relationships, but in those latter two, the center of orbit is very close to the center of the larger body, whereas in this case, it's out in space. That's a pretty good demonstration of why Pluto fails as a planet. that is definitely not clearing the orbit of other objects.
Stars are easily defined - they generate energy by nuclear fusion and have to be above a certain mass. Planets are, IIRC, currently defined as bodies whose own gravity pulls them into a spheroid shape and have cleared all smaller bodies that aren't their own moons from their orbital path.
I still say Pluto qualifies in regards to the last. Are there any other bodies that don't orbit Pluto anywhere close to Pluto's orbital path? I didn't think there was anything within literally billions of kilometers.
Pluto's orbit is erratic, taking it inside Neptune's orbit, and then out to the Kuiper Belt. It does not clear a path through the Kuiper Belt, which makes it a dwarf planet along with Makemake, and Haumea. Pluto's primary moon, Charon, is almost half the size as Pluto itself (and Pluto is smaller than Earth's Moon), and many feel it's equivalent enough in size to qualify as a double planetary system.