Pluto bigger than believed as flyby looms

Jesse Rogerson, a researcher at Toronto’s York University, says studying Pluto’s temperature and terrain will help scientists understand the evolution of various solar systems.

The doodle is a cute little animation showing New Horizons swiftly flying by the little planet.

NASA’s New Horizons mission has revealed the exact size of Pluto for the first time, and it’s slightly larger than we thought it was.

NEW YORK – NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will visit Pluto on Tuesday, an event which will be humanity’s first encounter with the dwarf planet on the edge of the solar system.

Pluto is the only planet discovered by an American, Clyde Tombaugh, who confirmed Pluto’s existence in 1930 from the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona (some of his ashes are aboard the New Horizons.) It is the only one that lent its name to a cartoon character. The spacecraft’s observations of Charon, the largest, confirm measurements made from Earth of 751 miles (1,208 km).

Early in the mission planning stages, Stern and his colleagues decided that on the day of closest approach all the spacecraft’s power should go toward gathering information, rather than beaming it across the solar system.

The craft will gather more data and photos when it gets close to Pluto before sending information back to earth.

Seven months into the probe’s journey, Pluto was downgraded by astronomers from a planet to a dwarf planet.

Any discovery of old dead volcanoes or dead geysers on Pluto would suggest it was once an active planet, he said.

New Horizons offers all the whiz-bang of many NASA missions; even more given the distances involved. This makes it the largest object yet discovered in the outer area of the Solar System in what is referred to as the Kuiper Belt.

The $728 million New Horizons launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on January 19, 2006, aboard an Atlas V rocket built by about 1,000 Lockheed Martin workers in Littleton.

As a matter of fact, New Horizons mission principal investigator Alan Stern says, “they are completely dichotomous”.

Pluto as pictured from New Horizon on July 11.

“There’s that small element of danger so I think we’re all going to breathe the final sigh of relief at 9 p.m. and that’s when we can really call it a successful flyby”, Stern said.

But despite its small size – just two thirds the diameter of the Earth’s moon – Pluto looks and behaves like a fully fledged planet, having an atmosphere and no less than five moons of its own.