Well, just the other day a shock and sense of dread went through the NASA control at New Horizons when the craft switched to its back up computer. The huge distances takes about 4 and a half hours to receive confirmation that all seemed well. You travel billions of miles and nearly a decade of flight time and as you enter thee sweet spot BOOM! the thing breaks down. But fortunately thing are running smoothly for the July 14 point of rendezvous.
You are now in control pluto ping
Isn’t there some paperwork or something to fill out before it’s a planet again?
Definition of a planet: a planet is a body that orbits the Sun, is massive enough for its own gravity to make it round, and has “cleared its neighbourhood” of smaller objects around its orbit.
So how is Pluto not a planet?
“From 1992 onward, many bodies were discovered orbiting in the same area as Pluto, showing that Pluto is part of a population of objects (which is called the Kuiper belt). This made its official status as a planet controversial, with many questioning whether Pluto should be considered together with or separately from its surrounding population. Museum and planetarium directors occasionally created controversy by omitting Pluto from planetary models of the Solar System. The Hayden Planetarium reopened—in February 2000, after renovation—with a model of only eight planets, which made headlines almost a year later.[59]
As objects increasingly closer in size to Pluto were discovered in the region, it was argued that Pluto should be reclassified as one of the Kuiper belt objects, just as Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta eventually lost their planet status after the discovery of many other asteroids. On 29 July 2005, the discovery of a new trans-Neptunian object, Eris, was announced, which was thought to be substantially larger than Pluto. This was the largest object discovered in the Solar System since Triton in 1846. Its discoverers and the press initially called it the tenth planet, although there was no official consensus at the time on whether to call it a planet.[60] Others in the astronomical community considered the discovery the strongest argument for reclassifying Pluto as a minor planet.[61]
IAU classification
The debate came to a head in 2006 with an IAU resolution that created an official definition for the term “planet”. According to this resolution, there are three main conditions for an object to be considered a ‘planet’:
1) The object must be in orbit around the Sun.
2) The object must be massive enough to be rounded by its own gravity. More specifically, its own gravity should pull it into a shape of hydrostatic equilibrium.
3) It must have cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.[62][63]
Pluto fails to meet the third condition, because its mass is only 0.07 times that of the mass of the other objects in its orbit (Earth’s mass, by contrast, is 1.7 million times the remaining mass in its own orbit).[61][63] The IAU further decided that bodies that, like Pluto, do not meet criterion 3 would be called dwarf planets.
On 13 September 2006, the IAU included Pluto and Eris and its moon Dysnomia in their Minor Planet Catalogue, giving them the official minor-planet designations “(134340) Pluto”, “(136199) Eris”, and “(136199) Eris I Dysnomia”.[64] If Pluto had been given one upon its discovery, the number would have been about 1,164 instead of 134,340.
There has been some resistance within the astronomical community toward the reclassification.[65][66][67] Alan Stern, principal investigator with NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto, publicly derided the IAU resolution, stating that “the definition stinks, for technical reasons”.[68] Stern’s contention was that by the terms of the new definition Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Neptune, all of which share their orbits with asteroids, would be excluded.[69] His other claim was that because less than five percent of astronomers voted for it, the decision was not representative of the entire astronomical community.[69] Marc W. Buie, then at Lowell Observatory, voiced his opinion on the new definition on his website and petitioned against the definition.[70] Others have supported the IAU. Mike Brown, the astronomer who discovered Eris, said “through this whole crazy circus-like procedure, somehow the right answer was stumbled on. It’s been a long time coming. Science is self-correcting eventually, even when strong emotions are involved.”[71]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto#Classification
It was redefined as something other than a planet.
A change that Pluto neither knows nor cares about, and which changes absolutely nothing except in the minds of a few human beings.
National Geographic has Pluto on its cover, but only a short article on Pluto near the end.
It says that the girl in England who first suggested the name Pluto was the niece of the man who came up with the names Phobos and Deimos for the two moons of Mars (he wasn't the man who discovered the moons). And that Mickey's dog wasn't named Pluto until a year after the planet was.
Is the unsharpness caused by atmosphere or are they using a Holga camera?
...and as you enter thee sweet spot BOOM! the thing breaks down....
Plutonians are doing the same thing to our spacecraft that Martians have been doing for decades.
It’s ugly. It deserves to have it’s planet status taken away../s
Why can’t Hubble get a clear photo?
Does this make muslims feel good about themselves?
I don’t care what Pluto is. All I know is that I’ve been waiting too long to see Pluto. If something else goes wrong, I will be so disappointed...although, “disappointed” is an understatement.
It was a horrible victim of Planetism!
It’s settled science!
Pluto is a dog. The question is “what is Goofy?”