Of all the planets in our solar system, the one that has caused the most controversy is Pluto. When it was discovered Feb 18 1930 it was instantly classified a planet. Since then many have speculated if it truly was a planet, or just a larger asteroid. The debate continues today with scientest currently attempting to hammer out an agreement on what is and isn’t a planet. This “planet definition” will play a role in future discoverys as well as with Pluto. Currenlty that status of 2003 UB313 is in limbo until the definition of a planet is defined. (2003 UB313 was discovered on October 21, 2003. It’s current informal name is Xena. It’s one known moon is informally named Gabrielle. Yes… from the TV show Xena.)

Pluto is on average 22,698,682,630 miles from the sun (twenty-two trillion) and orbits the sun every 248 years. The longest lived humans would only live to be one-half of a Plutonian year-old. The average temperature on Pluto is -380 °F. The rotation period is just a little over 6 days 9 hours.

We know very little about Pluto. We’ve had no spacecraft fly anywhere near it, unlike every other planet in the solar system. We are a people of exploration, plain and simple. There are a select few of people who believe that something like this is not worth our time, money and attention. Although maybe this will not help us live better lives, I find exploration of space truly facinating. Moving into the deep unknown and getting a chance to see strange and exotic places of the likes we’ll never see with our own eyes within our life time is amazing to me.

Pluto is often mistakenly said to not have an atmosphere. This is untrue. When Pluto is closest to the sun the atmosphere is thin and very light, composed of nitrogen and carbon monoxide. During the rest of the plutonian year the atmosphere lays frozen on the surface of the planet.

New Horizons will fly by Mars in April 2006. Fly by Jupiter in February 2007. On July 14, 2015, New Horizons should fly by Pluto and Charon. Between 2015 and 2020 it is hoped that the craft will fly past one or more Kuiper Belt objects.

It will take up to nine months for all the data to be downloaded from the craft after it’s flyby of Pluto. Data transmission will be at a very slow 768 bits per second from Pluto. (Compare to the slow internet dial-up speed of 57344 bits per second.) Therefore it is expected that we’ll have quite a bit of news worthy information about Pluto coming out sometime in April 2016.