The beautiful dwarf planet imaged by the New Horizons probe.
i am a space nerd, have been since a very early age. i grew up in the era of the US vs. USSR 1960s space race and was fascinated and astonished by the TV and newspaper images and reports of launches, spaceflights and just in general anything to do with what was beyond our atmosphere. I watched Gemini launches, watched the V specials on the missions flown by those brave explorers. In time I followed the transition to the Apollo program, bought books on the topic. I watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon, held my breath during the Apollo 13 return to Earth.
As manned spaceflight slowed down, I got equally excited about robotic spaceprobes sent out. the Voyager missions, various landing attempts on Mars and Venus. Finally i watched the launch of New Horizons, a probe sent out to investigate Pluto, followed the mission and made sure i was online for the first conference discussing the first images sent back from millions of miles away.
Like so many other people I had been disappointed at Pluto's "demotion from 'planet' status", but here were images showing the beauty of this little rocky body unimaginably far away. I felt like a child again as over time more images were released. This rock is beautiful. Darn it, it has a heart-shaped structure on its surface, who couldn't love that? New Horizons went on to investigate the body now known as Arrokoth, and may yet be given another science target in the future. Meanwhile, images of Pluto stand out as one of th most amazing space-related things i have lived to witness. Thank you Pluto!
Some Pluto Facts
Pluto has an atmosphere. Hardly breathable by life as we know it, it's nitrogen, with some methane and traces of carbon monoxide. It's long been known that it has a moon, CHaron, but it seems that they are tidally locked to each other, as well as being effectively a binary planet system, as they each orbit a barycentre, a point just beyond Pluto's surface.
Pluto's plains are largely covered with ices of its atmosphere, with mountains made of water ice. A large heart-shaped area known as Tombaugh Regio, named after Clyde Tombaugh who discovered the planet (and who is the only American to discover a planet!).
The interior is likely to be a core of rocky material surrounded by a mantle of water ice. Pluto has volcanoes! Spewing not lava, but liquid water likely heated by radioactive materials in the core, ome parts of Pluto are renewed by its volcanoes. According to the New Horizons science team, "Pluto displays a surprisingly wide variety of geological landforms, including those resulting from glaciological and surface–atmosphere interactions as well as impact, tectonic, possible cryovolcanic, and mass-wasting processes." these features even include dunes of material in parts of Sputnik Planitia. Thank you, New Horizons!
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