To be fair, Pluto had it coming. The word "planet" never had an official definition, and astronomers had always played fast and loose with its use. To the ancient Greeks, a planet was any "wandering star," which included thesunand themoon. With the Copernican revolution, the definition c...
That's right, NASA scientists want to make Pluto a planet again. Pluto was called a planet from 1930 to 2006. Then, it was demoted to a "dwarf planet." Alan Stern, the lead scientist with NASA’s New Horizon’s mission to Pluto noted that the IAU’s (International Astronomical Union'...
Without her there might never have been a New Horizons. We then follow the building of the spacecraft, its launch on 19 January 2006 and its journey to Pluto. The book discusses the precarious and precise nature of the Jupiter fly-by and gravity assist, and describes how through “pure...
What strikes me about the comparison with the 1930’s is that Pluto was unearthing the deep-seated roots of anti-Semitism and other decay that was festering underneath Western society for centuries. If there were no followers, the leader would never have come to be. Uranus with Pluto helped ...