Hello, Pluto: Let’s Have a Look at You!

It is a mission that started 9 years ago with a blastoff of a satellite intended to visit multiple planets including “Pluto.” This NASA spaceship, New Horizons, is bearing down on Pluto at 32,000 miles per hour and will arrive this Tuesday.

The $728 million mission is meant to give us our first real observations of Pluto, the minuscule planet that sits on the edge of our solar system. This spacecraft has been soaring through space and on Tuesday, July 14, New Horizons will come as close to Pluto as it will get. The public should have a view of this mysterious dwarf planet comparable to pictures of Earth taken from space.

It has taken 9 years covering 3 billion miles to get to Pluto which is about two-thirds the size of our moon. Pluto had been left out in the cold for decades as NASA explored larger and flashier planets. Pluto has been slighted so much that it recently was downgraded among astronomers who declared that it wasn’t a full-blown planet at all.

New Horizons will fly past Pluto with cameras and instruments extracting all kinds of data, at 6:49 a.m. Central time on July 14. The pictures if all goes well should be extraordinary. Imagine the excitement of the scientist involved with this project for the past decade or so.

If you are a person who is affected by the full moon on our planet, you may not want to go to Pluto. Pluto has 5 moons with the largest about half the size of Pluto.