Why NASA needs to visit Pluto again

1930s Clyde TombaughA 25-year-old amateur astronomer saw a small, dark object in the night sky.

He was working Lowell Observatory In Flagstaff, Arizona, about a year ago, when he used a blinking comparator — a special type of microscope that could analyze and compare images — he was once thought to be the ninth planet in our solar system: Pluto.

By all accounts, Pluto was weird — well. At one point, astronomers thought it could potentially be larger than Mars (it is not). An unusual orbit of 248 years is known cross the path of Neptune. Today, Pluto is recognized as the largest object in the Kuiper Belt, but is no longer considered a planet.

In 2006, International Astronomical Union He voted for the degradation of Pluto, defining a planet as a body orbiting the sun, meaning it has a round shape and has “cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.” It has become predominant on the gravitational level, so there is no body in its orbit field for its moons. Since Pluto did not check this third square, the planet was considered a dwarf.

A new concept mission now presented to NASA aims to take a closer look at Pluto and the surrounding systems. Proposed in late 2020, Persephone would study whether or not Pluto has an ocean and whether the planet’s surface and atmosphere have evolved.

Persephone would send a spacecraft armed with high-resolution cameras to orbit Pluto for three years and map its surface and its largest moon, Charon.

But why is it worth a visit to Pluto?

In the same year Pluto was thrown from the planet’s feet, sent by NASA New horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt to better understand the outside of our solar system.

After reaching Pluto in 2015, New Horizons became what was once a scientific treasure. Pluto’s foreground revealed potentially active mountain ranges, ice spills, and an amazing record geological history on its surface.

Carly HowettBecause of the physicist Planet and Persephone’s principal investigator, New Horizons showed us how complex that part of space is.

“It wasn’t that New Horizon had basically new technology, but it did give people a way to find out what the Pluto system might look like,” says Howett. “The world saw Pluto for the first time.”