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How Long Does It Take to Get to Pluto?

It’s a long way out to the dwarf planet Pluto. So, just how fast could we get there?

Pluto, the Dwarf planet, is an incomprehensibly long distance away. Seriously, it’s currently more than 5 billion kilometers away from Earth. It challenges the imagination that anyone could ever travel that kind of distance, and yet, NASA’s New Horizons has been making the journey, and it’s going to arrive there July, 2015.

You may have just heard about this news. And I promise you, when New Horizons makes its close encounter, it’s going to be everywhere. So let me give you the advanced knowledge on just how amazing this journey is, and what it would take to cross this enormous gulf in the Solar System.

Pluto travels on a highly elliptical orbit around the Sun. At its closest point, known as “perihelion”, Pluto is only 4.4 billion kilometers out. That’s nearly 30 AU, or 30 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Pluto last reached this point on September 5th, 1989. At its most distant point, known as “aphelion”, Pluto reaches a distance of 7.3 billion kilometers, or 49 AU. This will happen on August 23, 2113.

I know, these numbers seem incomprehensible and lose their meaning. So let me give you some context. Light itself takes 4.6 hours to travel from the Earth to Pluto. If you wanted to send a signal to Pluto, it would take 4.6 hours for your transmission to reach Pluto, and then an additional 4.6 hours for their message to return to us.

Let’s talk spacecraft. When New Horizons blasted off from Earth, it was going 58,000 km/h. Just for comparison, astronauts in orbit are merely jaunting along at 28,000 km/h. That’s its speed going away from the Earth. When you add up the speed of the Earth, New Horizons was moving away from the Sun at a blistering 160,000 km/h.

Unfortunately, the pull of gravity from the Sun slowed New Horizons down. By the time it reached Jupiter, it was only going 68,000 km/h. It was able to steal a little velocity from Jupiter and crank its speed back up to 83,000 km/h. When it finally reaches Pluto, it’ll be going about 50,000 km/h. So how long did this journey take?

New Horizons launched on January 19, 2006, and it’ll reach Pluto on July 14, 2015. Do a little math and you’ll find that it has taken 9 years, 5 months and 25 days. The Voyager spacecraft did the distance between Earth and Pluto in about 12.5 years, although, neither spacecraft actually flew past Pluto. And the Pioneer spacecraft completed the journey in about 11 years.

Could you get to Pluto faster? Absolutely. With a more powerful rocket, and a lighter spacecraft payload, you could definitely shave down the flight time. But there are a couple of problems. Rockets are expensive, coincidentally bigger rockets are super expensive. The other problem is that getting to Pluto faster means that it’s harder to do any kind of science once you reach the dwarf planet.

New Horizons made the fastest journey to Pluto, but it’s also going to fly past the planet at 50,000 km/h. That’s less time to take high resolution images. And if you wanted to actually go into orbit around Pluto, you’d need more rockets to lose all that velocity. So how long does it take to get to Pluto? Roughly 9-12 years. You could probably get there faster, but then you’d get less science done, and it probably wouldn’t be worth the rush.

Are you super excited about the New Horizons flyby of Pluto? Tell us all about it in the comments below.

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5 Replies to “How Long Does It Take to Get to Pluto?”

Cassini/Huygens may be a good example for making long duration science… Next spacecraft, “unique to Pluto”, may be planned, and, may even drop a science lab on it… (I mean “non-zipping type lab”…!)

Enormous distances keep the human mind in Perihelion and Aphelion: we get near then we go far. After all the science involved to achieve such feats, it’s still very scary and fear inspiring.

The New Horizons spacecraft mission to Pluto is a truly stunning adventure. I only wish part of the overall mission was to orbit planet Pluto (yes, Pluto is a planet). It is my opinion, the greatly added expense to equip the spacecraft with the required decelerating retro rockets, slowing New Horizons to orbit speed would have been well worth the high investment and extra time needed to traverse the great gulf between Earth and Pluto. After all, when will we be here again?

As Buzz Lightyear would put it: “To infinity and beyond!”

I’ve been following since launch. This is super exciting and worth every second I watched tick off the counters on their webpage.

Fraser, as I said in an earlier blog entry on this subject, I could not possibly be more excited about the New Horizons probe. Pluto (which *I* still consider to be a planet!) was discovered just three years before I was born. I was 70 in 2003 when the planning to send a probe past Pluto really got serious. I was beside myself that we might actually get some close up pictures of it within my lifetime. I just hoped I would live that long. Well, I hit 82 last month and here we are just four months shy of that accomplishment. I think I’ll make it and I think New Horizons will too! But it gets even better, because first came Charon and then Nix and Hydra and then P4 and P5! It gives new meaning to the word “wow”! I certainly shouldn’t complain but it is a shame that we’re “driving by” so fast. Is anyone taking any bets on New Horizons finding something new, something we haven’t seen before among the many planets we have visited?

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March 10, 2015

How long does it take to get to Pluto?

by Fraser Cain, Universe Today

It's a long way out to the dwarf planet Pluto. So, just how fast could we get there?

Pluto, the Dwarf planet, is an incomprehensibly long distance away. Seriously, it's currently more than 5 billion kilometers away from Earth. It challenges the imagination that anyone could ever travel that kind of distance, and yet, NASA's New Horizons has been making the journey, and it's going to arrive there July, 2015.

You may have just heard about this news. And I promise you, when New Horizons makes its close encounter, it's going to be everywhere. So let me give you the advanced knowledge on just how amazing this journey is, and what it would take to cross this enormous gulf in the Solar System.

Pluto travels on a highly elliptical orbit around the sun. At its closest point, known as "perihelion", Pluto is only 4.4 billion kilometers out. That's nearly 30 AU, or 30 times the distance from the Earth to the sun. Pluto last reached this point on September 5th, 1989. At its most distant point, known as "aphelion", Pluto reaches a distance of 7.3 billion kilometers, or 49 AU. This will happen on August 23, 2113.

I know, these numbers seem incomprehensible and lose their meaning. So let me give you some context. Light itself takes 4.6 hours to travel from the Earth to Pluto. If you wanted to send a signal to Pluto, it would take 4.6 hours for your transmission to reach Pluto, and then an additional 4.6 hours for their message to return to us.

Let's talk spacecraft. When New Horizons blasted off from Earth, it was going 58,000 km/h. Just for comparison, astronauts in orbit are merely jaunting along at 28,000 km/h. That's its speed going away from the Earth. When you add up the speed of the Earth, New Horizons was moving away from the sun at a blistering 160,000 km/h.

Unfortunately, the pull of gravity from the sun slowed New Horizons down. By the time it reached Jupiter, it was only going 68,000 km/h. It was able to steal a little velocity from Jupiter and crank its speed back up to 83,000 km/h. When it finally reaches Pluto, it'll be going about 50,000 km/h. So how long did this journey take?

New Horizons launched on January 19, 2006, and it'll reach Pluto on July 14, 2015. Do a little math and you'll find that it has taken 9 years, 5 months and 25 days. The Voyager spacecraft did the distance between Earth and Pluto in about 12.5 years, although, neither spacecraft actually flew past Pluto. And the Pioneer spacecraft completed the journey in about 11 years.

Could you get to Pluto faster? Absolutely. With a more powerful rocket, and a lighter spacecraft payload, you could definitely shave down the flight time. But there are a couple of problems. Rockets are expensive, coincidentally bigger rockets are super expensive. The other problem is that getting to Pluto faster means that it's harder to do any kind of science once you reach the dwarf planet.

New Horizons made the fastest journey to Pluto, but it's also going to fly past the planet at 50,000 km/h. That's less time to take high resolution images. And if you wanted to actually go into orbit around Pluto, you'd need more rockets to lose all that velocity. So how long does it take to get to Pluto? Roughly 9-12 years. You could probably get there faster, but then you'd get less science done, and it probably wouldn't be worth the rush.

Source: Universe Today

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NASA’s three-billion-mile journey to Pluto reaches historic encounter

“I’m delighted at this latest accomplishment by NASA, another first that demonstrates once again how the United States leads the world in space,” said John Holdren, assistant to the President for Science and Technology and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “New Horizons is the latest in a long line of scientific accomplishments at NASA, including multiple missions orbiting and exploring the surface of Mars in advance of human visits still to come; the remarkable Kepler mission to identify Earth-like planets around stars other than our own; and the DSCOVR satellite that soon will be beaming back images of the whole Earth in near real-time from a vantage point a million miles away. As New Horizons completes its flyby of Pluto and continues deeper into the Kuiper Belt, NASA’s multifaceted journey of discovery continues.”

“The exploration of Pluto and its moons by New Horizons represents the capstone event to 50 years of planetary exploration by NASA and the United States,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. “Once again we have achieved a historic first. The United States is the first nation to reach Pluto, and with this mission has completed the initial survey of our solar system, a remarkable accomplishment that no other nation can match.”

The Pluto story began only a generation ago when young Clyde Tombaugh was tasked to look for Planet X, theorized to exist beyond the orbit of Neptune. He discovered a faint point of light that we now see as a complex and fascinating world.

“Pluto was discovered just 85 years ago by a farmer’s son from Kansas, inspired by a visionary from Boston, using a telescope in Flagstaff, Arizona,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “Today, science takes a great leap observing the Pluto system up close and flying into a new frontier that will help us better understand the origins of the solar system.”

New Horizons’ flyby of the dwarf planet and its five known moons is providing an up-close introduction to the solar system’s Kuiper Belt, an outer region populated by icy objects ranging in size from boulders to dwarf planets. Kuiper Belt objects, such as Pluto, preserve evidence about the early formation of the solar system.

New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, says the mission now is writing the textbook on Pluto.

“The New Horizons team is proud to have accomplished the first exploration of the Pluto system,” Stern said. “This mission has inspired people across the world with the excitement of exploration and what humankind can achieve.”

New Horizons’ almost 10-year, 3-billion-mile (5 billion km) journey to closest approach at Pluto took about one minute less than predicted when the craft was launched in January 2006. The spacecraft threaded the needle through a 36-by-57 mile (60 by 90 km) window in space — the equivalent of a commercial airliner arriving no more off target than the width of a tennis ball.

Because New Horizons is the fastest spacecraft ever launched — hurtling through the Pluto system at more than 30,000 mph, a collision with a particle as small as a grain of rice could incapacitate the spacecraft. Once it reestablishes contact Tuesday night, it will take 16 months for New Horizons to send its cache of data — 10 years’ worth — back to Earth.

New Horizons is the latest in a long line of scientific accomplishments at NASA, including multiple rovers exploring the surface of Mars, the Cassini spacecraft that has revolutionized our understanding of Saturn and the Hubble Space Telescope, which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. All of this scientific research and discovery is helping to inform the agency’s plan to send American astronauts to Mars in the 2030’s.

“After nearly 15 years of planning, building, and flying the New Horizons spacecraft across the solar system, we’ve reached our goal,” said project manager Glen Fountain at APL “The bounty of what we’ve collected is about to unfold.”

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Exploring the unexplored: new horizons’ mission to pluto, bob granath.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft soon will pass through the outer edges of the solar system. After a nine year and more than 3.6 billion mile trip, plans call for the probe to provide the first close up observations of Pluto and the most distant objects in the solar system.

“Of course we’ve seen it before, but we’ve never seen it like we’re going to see it on July 14,” said NASA Deputy Administrator Dava Newman, Ph.D., during a recent visit to the Kennedy Space Center.

Lifting off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Jan. 19, 2006, New Horizons has traveled a longer time and farther away than any previous space mission to reach its primary destination, Pluto and the Kuiper Belt.

On June 2, New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, Ph.D., spoke to Kennedy Space Center employees, providing a preview of what to expect when the spacecraft makes its closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015.

“It’s an epic journey across the solar system,” said Stern, who is associate vice president for Research and Development at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado.

The New Frontiers spacecraft was built by a team led by Stern and included researchers from SwRI and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. APL also operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission.

“Nothing like this has happened since the Voyager program launched in 1977,” said Stern.

During the mid-1960s, the United States and Soviet Union began sending probes to the planets closest to Earth – Venus and Mars. However, it was not until the 1970s that spacecraft were being launched toward Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn. The most significant step was Voyager 2, also referred to as the “Grand Tour.” Launched from Cape Canaveral in 1977, it passed Jupiter in 1979, Saturn in 1981, Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989.

“I’m particularly proud of the tradition that began in 1962 with Mariner to Venus,” said Stern, a former associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “The United States was first to every planet in the solar system. Centuries from now people will read about how, in one short period of time, a little over 50 years, we started from scratch eventually exploring across the solar system. But, we have a bit of unfinished business. New Horizons is going to complete that.”

New Horizons launched from Cape Canaveral on Jan. 19, 2006 directly into an Earth-and-solar-escape trajectory. After the spacecraft separated from its third stage solid-fuel kick motor 44 minutes, 53 seconds after launch, the Pluto probe was on its way at 36,373 mph. With that velocity, it needed only nine hours to pass through the moon’s orbit.

The planet Jupiter provided New Horizons with a gravity assist when it passed within 1.4 million miles on Feb. 28, 2007. A gravity assist maneuver puts a spacecraft in a trajectory close enough to a planet to use its gravity. This alters the probe’s path in a “slingshot maneuver” to change speed saving propellant and travel time.

The Jupiter flyby increased New Horizons speed, accelerating the probe to 51,000 mph and shortening its voyage to Pluto by five to six years.

During the Jupiter encounter, New Horizons trained its science instruments on the large planet and its moons. After that, Chuck Tatro, who was the New Horizons launch site mission manager for LSP, explains the spacecraft was placed in “electronic hibernation” for much of the trip to Pluto. New Horizons pioneered routine cruise-flight hibernation. Not only has it reduced wear and tear on the spacecraft’s electronics, it lowered operations costs and freed up NASA Deep Space Network tracking and communication resources for other missions.

“Throughout the almost nine-year trip, flight controllers would ‘wake up’ New Horizons once every year to confirm the health of the spacecraft and perform any needed course corrections,” he said. “It was brought out of its final hibernation period on Dec. 6, 2014 to prepare for the Pluto encounter this summer.”

When New Horizons’ closest approach to Pluto begins, the probe will perform a flyby during which it will attempt to take detailed measurements and images of the small planet and its moons.

“It will whiz by Pluto,” said Tatro, who currently is chief of the Launch Site Integration Branch of LSP. “The fly-by will last only eight to 10 hours. We’ll be receiving the bulk of the data during a period of about 24 hours.”

Due to the 3.625-billion-mile distance, it will take about four-and-a-half hours for the signals to reach Earth with the long-awaited information.

“The closest approach period really starts around the first of the month, (July 2015) and goes for several weeks,” Stern said. “About 900 scientific observations will be taking place.”

New Horizons is intended to pass within 6,200 miles of Pluto, at about 7:50 a.m. EDT on July 14. The spacecraft will have a relative velocity of 30,800 mph at its approach and will come as close as 17,000 miles to Pluto’s largest moon, Charon.

“This is true exploration,” Stern said. “We’re going to write the book on Pluto.”

Planetary scientists believe Pluto is primarily made of rock and ice and is relatively small, about one-sixth the mass of the moon and one-third its volume.

“Pluto is about the size of the United States,” Stern said. “Charon is about the size of Texas.”

Charon has a diameter just over half that of Pluto with the two sometimes described as a binary system. This is because the barycenter of their orbits do not lie within either body. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has yet to formalize a definition for binary dwarf planets and Charon is still officially classified as a moon of Pluto along with Nix, Hydra, Kerberos and Styx.

When the New Horizons spacecraft was launched, Pluto was still classified as a planet, later to be reclassified as a dwarf planet by the IAU. Stern disagrees with that definition and still describes Pluto as a planet.

“We’re just learning that a lot of planets are small planets and we didn’t know that before,” he said. “Fact is, in planetary science, objects such as Pluto and the other dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt are considered planets and called planets in everyday discourse in scientific meetings.”

Pluto’s orbital period is 248 Earth years and its orbital characteristics are substantially different from those of the planets. From Mercury to Neptune, the other bodies circle the sun following nearly circular, almost flat, orbits. In contrast, Pluto has an eccentric and highly inclined orbit that takes it from 2.8 to 4.6 billion miles from the sun. Hence, Pluto periodically comes closer to the sun than Neptune, but their orbital resonance prevents the bodies from colliding.

Tatro noted that for the past nine years, Pluto’s 3.625-billion-mile distance from the sun gives a rare opportunity to determine the nature of any atmosphere.

“Due to this ‘relative closeness’ to the Sun, scientists feel this provides the best hope of detecting any type of atmosphere around Pluto,” he said. “This is because of the sun’s weak heating at this ‘closer’ distance.”

After its flyby of Pluto, New Horizons may also open the door to an entirely new zone of mysterious small planets and planetary building blocks in the Kuiper Belt, a large area with numerous objects beyond Neptune’s orbit.

“Gerard Kuiper, who was a leading 20th century planetary scientist, believed that the reason Pluto looked like a misfit was that our technology was not good enough to find things orbiting with it,” Stern said.

The Kuiper Belt is a region of the solar system beyond the planets, extending beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is similar to the asteroid belt, but it is much larger — 20 times as wide and 20 to 200 times as massive. Like the asteroid belt, it consists mainly of small bodies, or remnants from the solar system’s formation.

By expanding the frontiers of knowledge, capability and opportunity in space, NASA hopes to better understand the farthest reaches of the solar system, answering questions about Earth and life beyond.

“The universe has a lot more variety than we thought about and that’s wonderful,” Stern said. “The most exciting discoveries will likely be the ones we don’t anticipate.”

NASA's 3-billion-mile journey to Pluto reaches historic encounter

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is at Pluto.

After a decade-long journey through our solar system, New Horizons made its closest approach to Pluto July 14, about 7,750 miles above the surface – roughly the same distance from New York to Mumbai, India  – making it the first-ever space mission to explore a world so far from Earth.

“I’m delighted at this latest accomplishment by NASA, another first that demonstrates once again how the United States leads the world in space,” said John Holdren, assistant to the President for Science and Technology and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “New Horizons is the latest in a long line of scientific accomplishments at NASA, including multiple missions orbiting and exploring the surface of Mars in advance of human visits still to come; the remarkable Kepler mission to identify Earth-like planets around stars other than our own; and the DSCOVR satellite that soon will be beaming back images of the whole Earth in near real-time from a vantage point a million miles away. As New Horizons completes its flyby of Pluto and continues deeper into the Kuiper Belt, NASA's multifaceted journey of discovery continues."

“The exploration of Pluto and its moons by New Horizons represents the capstone event to 50 years of planetary exploration by NASA and the United States," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. “Once again we have achieved a historic first. The United States is the first nation to reach Pluto, and with this mission has completed the initial survey of our solar system, a remarkable accomplishment that no other nation can match.”

Per the plan, the spacecraft currently is in data-gathering mode and not in contact with flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physical Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. Scientists are waiting to find out whether New Horizons “phones home,” transmitting to Earth a series of status updates that indicate the spacecraft survived the flyby and is in good health.

The Pluto story began only a generation ago when young Clyde Tombaugh was tasked to look for Planet X, theorized to exist beyond the orbit of Neptune. He discovered a faint point of light that we now see as a complex and fascinating world.

"Pluto was discovered just 85 years ago by a farmer's son from Kansas, inspired by a visionary from Boston, using a telescope in Flagstaff, Arizona,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "Today, science takes a great leap observing the Pluto system up close and flying into a new frontier that will help us better understand the origins of the solar system.”

New Horizons’ flyby of the dwarf planet and its five known moons is providing an up-close introduction to the solar system's Kuiper Belt, an outer region populated by icy objects ranging in size from boulders to dwarf planets. Kuiper Belt objects, such as Pluto, preserve evidence about the early formation of the solar system.

New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, says the mission now is writing the textbook on Pluto.

"The New Horizons team is proud to have accomplished the first exploration of the Pluto system,” Stern said. “This mission has inspired people across the world with the excitement of exploration and what humankind can achieve.”

New Horizons’ almost 10-year, 3-billion-mile journey to closest approach at Pluto took about one minute less than predicted when the craft was launched in January 2006. The spacecraft threaded the needle through a 36-by-57 mile (60 by 90 kilometers) window in space – the equivalent of a commercial airliner arriving no more off target than the width of a tennis ball.

Because New Horizons is the fastest spacecraft ever launched – hurtling through the Pluto system at more than 30,000 mph, a collision with a particle as small as a grain of rice could incapacitate the spacecraft. Once it reestablishes contact Tuesday night, it will take 16 months for New Horizons to send its cache of data – 10 years’ worth – back to Earth.

New Horizons is the latest in a long line of scientific accomplishments at NASA, including multiple rovers exploring the surface of Mars, the Cassini spacecraft that has revolutionized our understanding of Saturn and the Hubble Space Telescope, which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. All of this scientific research and discovery is helping to inform the agency’s plan to send American astronauts to Mars in the 2030s.

“After nearly 15 years of planning, building, and flying the New Horizons spacecraft across the solar system, we’ve reached our goal,” said project manager Glen Fountain at APL “The bounty of what we’ve collected is about to unfold.”

APL designed, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. SwRI leads the mission, science team, payload operations and encounter science planning. New Horizons is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, managed by the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Follow the New Horizons mission on Twitter and use the hashtag #PlutoFlyby to join the conversation. Live updates also will be available on the mission Facebook page .

For more information on the New Horizons mission, including fact sheets, schedules, video and images, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons  

Find Your Pluto Time

Pluto orbits on the fringes of our solar system, billions of miles away. Sunlight is much weaker there than it is here on Earth, yet it isn't completely dark. In fact, for just a moment near dawn and dusk each day, the illumination on Earth matches that of high noon on Pluto.

We call this Pluto Time .

If you go outside at this time on a clear day, the world around you will be as bright as the brightest part of the day on Pluto.

Use This Tool to Find Your Pluto Time

Learn more about pluto.

Pluto is a complex and mysterious world with mountains, valleys, plains, craters, and apparently even glaciers.

Discover More Topics From NASA

Asteroids, Comets & Meteors

Kuiper Belt

Pluto is a complex and mysterious world with mountains, valleys, plains, craters, and maybe glaciers. Discovered in 1930, Pluto was long considered our solar system's ninth planet. But after the discovery of similar intriguing worlds deeper in the distant Kuiper Belt, icy Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet.

Pluto is only about 1,400 miles wide. At that small size, Pluto is only about half the width of the United States. It's about 3.6 billion miles away from the Sun, and it has a thin atmosphere composed mostly of nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide. On average, Pluto’s temperature is -387°F (-232°C), making it too cold to sustain life.

Pluto is orbited by five known moons, the largest of which is Charon. Charon is about half the size of Pluto itself, making it the largest satellite relative to the planet it orbits in our solar system. Pluto and Charon are often referred to as a "double planet."

Pluto is the only world (so far) named by an 11-year-old girl. In 1930, Venetia Burney of Oxford, England, suggested to her grandfather that the new discovery be named for the Roman god of the underworld. He forwarded the name to the Lowell Observatory and it was selected.

Pluto's moons are named for other mythological figures associated with the underworld. Charon is named for the river Styx boatman who ferries souls in the underworld (as well as honoring Sharon, the wife of discoverer James Christy); Nix is named for the mother of Charon, who is also the goddess of darkness and night; Hydra is named for the nine-headed serpent that guards the underworld; Kerberos is named after the three-headed dog of Greek mythology (and called Fluffy in the Harry Potter novels), and Styx is named for the mythological river that separates the world of the living from the realm of the dead.

Pluto's place in mythology can get a little muddled, so we asked Dr. Elizabeth Vandiver, chair of the Department of Classics in Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, to clarify the origins of the name: "Pluto is the name of the Roman god of the Underworld, equivalent to the Greek Hades. However, the Greek name "Plouton" (from which the Romans derived their name "Pluto") was also occasionally used as an alternative name for Hades. But Pluto is definitely the Roman spelling."

Potential for Life

The surface of Pluto is extremely cold, so it seems unlikely that life could exist there. At such cold temperatures, water, which is vital for life as we know it, is essentially rock-like. Pluto's interior is warmer, however, and some think there could even be an ocean deep inside.

Size and Distance

With a radius of 715 miles (1,151 kilometers), Pluto is about 1/6 the width of Earth. If Earth was the size of a nickel, Pluto would be about as big as a popcorn kernel.

From an average distance of 3.7 billion miles (5.9 billion kilometers), Pluto is 39 astronomical units away from the Sun. One astronomical unit (abbreviated as AU), is the distance from the Sun to Earth. From this distance, it takes sunlight 5.5 hours to travel from the Sun to Pluto.

If you were to stand on the surface of Pluto at noon, the Sun would be 1/900 the brightness it is here on Earth, or about 300 times as bright as our full moon. There is a moment each day near sunset here on Earth when the light is the same brightness as midday on Pluto. Find out when you can experience "Pluto time" where you live.

Orbit and Rotation

Pluto's orbit around the Sun is unusual compared to the planets: it's both elliptical and tilted. Pluto's 248-year-long, oval-shaped orbit can take it as far as 49.3 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun, and as close as 30 AU. (One AU is the mean distance between Earth and the Sun: about 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers.) But on average, Pluto is 3.7 billion miles (5.9 billion kilometers) away from the Sun, or 39 AU.

From 1979 to 1999, Pluto was near perihelion, when it is closest to the Sun. During this time, Pluto was actually closer to the Sun than Neptune.

One day on Pluto takes about 153 hours. Its axis of rotation is tilted 57 degrees with respect to the plane of its orbit around the Sun, so it spins almost on its side. Pluto also exhibits a retrograde rotation; spinning from east to west like Venus and Uranus.

Pluto has five known moons: Charon, Nix, Hydra, Kerberos, and Styx. This moon system might have formed by a collision between Pluto and another similar-sized body early in the history of the solar system.

Charon, the biggest of Pluto's moons, is about half the size of Pluto itself, making it the largest satellite relative to the planet it orbits in our solar system. It orbits Pluto at a distance of just 12,200 miles (19,640 kilometers). For comparison, our Moon is 20 times farther away from Earth. Pluto and Charon are often referred to as a double planet.

Charon's orbit around Pluto takes 153 hours – the same time it takes Pluto to complete one rotation. This means Charon neither rises nor sets, but hovers over the same spot on Pluto's surface. The same side of Charon always faces Pluto, a state called tidal locking.

Pluto's other four moons are much smaller, less than 100 miles (160 kilometers) wide. They're also irregularly shaped, not spherical like Charon. Unlike many other moons in the solar system, these moons are not tidally locked to Pluto. They all spin and don’t keep the same face towards Pluto.

There are no known rings around Pluto.

Dwarf planet Pluto is a member of a group of objects that orbit in a disc-like zone beyond the orbit of Neptune called the Kuiper Belt. This distant realm is populated with thousands of miniature icy worlds, which formed early in the history of our solar system about 4.5 billion years ago. These icy, rocky bodies are called Kuiper Belt objects, transneptunian objects, or plutoids.

Pluto is about two-thirds the diameter of Earth's Moon and probably has a rocky core surrounded by a mantle of water ice. Interesting ices like methane and nitrogen frost coat the surface. Due to its lower density, Pluto's mass is about one-sixth that of Earth's Moon.

Pluto's surface is characterized by mountains, valleys, plains, and craters. The temperature on Pluto can be as cold as -375 to -400 degrees Fahrenheit (-226 to -240 degrees Celsius).

Pluto's tallest mountains are 6,500 to 9,800 feet (2 to 3 kilometers) in height. The mountains are big blocks of water ice, sometimes with a coating of frozen gases like methane. Long troughs and valleys as long as 370 miles (600 kilometers) add to the interesting features of this faraway dwarf planet.

Craters as large as 162 miles (260 kilometers) in diameter dot some of the landscape on Pluto, with some showing signs of erosion and filling. This suggests tectonic forces are slowly resurfacing Pluto.

The most prominent plains observed on Pluto appear to be made of frozen nitrogen gas and show no craters. These plains do show structures suggesting convection (blobs of material circulating up and down).

Pluto has a thin, tenuous atmosphere that expands when it comes closer to the Sun and collapses as it moves farther away – similar to a comet. The main constituent is molecular nitrogen, though molecules of methane and carbon monoxide have also been detected.

When Pluto is close to the Sun, its surface ices sublimate (changing directly from solid to gas) and rise to temporarily form a thin atmosphere. Pluto's low gravity (about 6% of Earth's) causes the atmosphere to be much more extended in altitude than our planet's atmosphere. Pluto becomes much colder during the part of each year when it is traveling far away from the Sun. During this time, the bulk of the planet's atmosphere may freeze and fall as snow to the surface.

Magnetosphere

It isn't known whether Pluto has a magnetic field, but its small size and slow rotation suggest little or none.

• New Horizons Mission Website
• NASA Planetary Photojournal: Pluto
• Pluto 3D Model
• Pluto Poster - Version A
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13.7 Cosmos & Culture

How long would it take to drive to pluto.

We don't make very good judges of distance, not on cosmic scales at least. Using our own wanderings on Earth as the judge of all things, evolution has left us poorly prepared for the epic scales of all things astronomical.

This week, as a box of electronics called New Horizons prepares to complete a nearly 10-year journey to Pluto, it's a good moment to reflect on just how far away even the objects in our astronomical backyard are from us.

When astronomers measure distances in solar systems their meter stick is the average distance between Earth and the sun. It's called an astronomical unit , or AU, and it equals about 93 million miles. Earth obviously lives at 1 AU from the sun. Mars is about 1.5 AU. Jupiter orbits out at around 5 AU and Saturn, with its gorgeous rings, lives about twice as far out at almost 10 AU from the sun.

So where is Pluto?

Unlike the other planets whose tracks around our star are pretty much circles, Pluto's orbit swings in and out on a highly elliptical orbit. It comes as "close" to the sun as 30 or so AU (inside Neptune's orbit) and as far out as almost 50 AU. At an average distance of 3.7 billion miles from the sun, wee Pluto lives in a world of perpetual twilight.

But exactly how far is 3.7 billion miles?

The problem with astronomical distances is simple. Once you get past a couple hundred thousand of anything, who can really tell the difference? How much bigger is 10 billion miles compared to 75 million miles? It's not like we have day-to-day experience with this kind of thing. So, what do we have visceral experience with when it comes to distance?

Driving. We do a lot of driving.

As everyone knows, being in the car for 10 minutes is not a big deal — but a 10 hour drive will suck the life out of you. That means we all use time to understand distance. Buffalo is an hour away from where I live in Rochester. New York City, however, is 5 1/2 hours. Washington, D.C., is 10 hours, Minneapolis is two days and LA is a long week of back pain, junk food, monotony and some spectacular views.

So, if it's a week to cross the country, how long would it take to drive to Pluto?

Doing the simplest calculation possible assumes a straight-line trip from Earth to the dwarf planet, ignoring each planet's motion as well as the need to stop and pee. In our calculation, we will also promise to be good and not speed, keeping a steady 65 miles per hour the whole way. And to keep things simple, let's use Pluto's average orbital distance of 39 AU. So, when we put all this together how long would our solar-system-spanning road trip last?

Just a mere 6,293 years (give or take a few decades).

Oh, come on now. Stop complaining. That's not so bad. It's actually less time than some creationists think the universe has existed. Of course, a 6,293-year-long road trip is not something you want to try with little kids. The asteroid belt is nothing but tourist traps, and the rest stops really thin out after Saturn.

Some of you will want to consider flying.

Luckily, at a Boeing 777's maximum velocity of 590 miles per hour, the trip to Pluto will take only about 680 years. Make sure you pick up some sandwiches and Cinnabons in the airport before you leave because you can bet the flight attendants are gonna run out of boxed meals before you even get past Mars.

So, when New Horizons zooms past Pluto on July 14, giving us our first view of the solar system's outer output, show some respect. Blown off the Earth with the fastest speed ever (for a launched spacecraft), it's now traveling at more than 50,000 miles per hour . The voyage that would have taken you more than 6,000 years in an SUV or 600 years in a jetliner has taken New Horizons a little under a decade. And after Pluto, New Horizons will sail through the Kuiper Belt (an extended ring of planetary construction debris) and out, eventually, toward the stars.

But that is another long, long, very long story.

Adam Frank is a co-founder of the 13.7 blog, an astrophysics professor at the University of Rochester, a book author and a self-described "evangelist of science." You can keep up with more of what Adam is thinking on Facebook and Twitter: @adamfrank4 .

• new horizons

The Path to Pluto

A lan Stern was still a grad student at the University of Colorado back in 1989 when NASA’s Voyager 2 space probe completed its grand tour of the outer solar system. Its sister ship Voyager 1 had gone before it, returning the first close-up images and scientific measurements of the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn, along with their moons. But then it veered off, and Voyager 2 went on alone to explore Uranus as well, and then Neptune, at the outer edge of the solar system. And with that remarkable feat, the first reconnaissance of our sun’s planetary family was complete.

Except, of course, for Pluto. At the time, there simply wasn’t enough fuel to get Voyager 2 there. Surely NASA’s strategic vision included a later trip by a different ship to visit the tiny planet–and for the record, nobody doubted back then that it was a planet. But through failure of both will and wallet, NASA had no such plans. So a young Stern decided he’d lead the charge to make a Pluto mission happen.

On July 14, more than a quarter-century later, his dream will finally be fulfilled. Around noon on that date, after a nine-year, 3 billion-mile journey, NASA’s 1,000-lb., grand-piano-size, $700 million New Horizons probe will streak past tiny Pluto at a blistering 31,000 m.p.h. The spacecraft is so remote now that radio communications–traveling at the speed of light–require a nearly nine-hour round-trip. Ultimately, New Horizons will come to within just 6,000 miles of the icy world, furiously snapping pictures and recording data on the temperature, structure and composition of Pluto, its five known moons and anything else that might be there–more moons, perhaps, or a system of rings.

But it’s Pluto that’s the real prize. The little world has intrigued astronomers since it was first discovered more than 85 years ago. Until Pluto showed up, all the outer planets were known to be gas giants. What was this pip-squeak doing out there all alone? What was it made of? Why did it even exist?

For a long time, those questions seemed destined to go unanswered. Stern and other scientists appealed to NASA a half-dozen times during the 1990s with one proposal after another for a Pluto mission. They trudged to and from conference rooms, armed with charts and graphs and spreadsheets, with technical specs demonstrating why this latest version of a Pluto plan would be better, faster and cheaper than the one before it. And each time, NASA said no–usually on the grounds of budgetary poverty.

“I was counseled many times by senior people to give it up,” Stern says. “They said things like ‘You have better things to do with your career’ and ‘There’s a fine line between being in the groove and stuck in a rut.'” He ignored them.

Fortunately, he had a very nonscientific card to play: human sentiment. People just love Pluto. From the moment of its discovery in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh, an Illinois farm boy who’d talked his way into a job at Arizona’s Lowell Observatory even though he’d never been to college, the tiny world fired the public imagination. At first, it was known simply as New Planet, but it was soon given its familiar name at the suggestion of an 11-year-old British girl named Venetia Burney, who thought the Roman god of the underworld nicely captured the feeling surrounding the dark and remote world. A few months later, Walt Disney capitalized on the public’s fascination by naming Mickey Mouse’s pet dog after the new planet. In 1955 the first Frisbee was marketed as the Pluto Platter.

In the decades after Pluto’s discovery, better observations made it clear that the new world wasn’t anywhere near the size of the 7,926-mile-diameter Earth but just 1,471 miles across, or smaller than the moon. And starting in the ’90s, astronomers began to realize that Pluto isn’t alone at all. It’s merely the brightest member of an enormous swarm of ice-covered objects that make up what’s known as the Kuiper Belt, which orbits the sun out beyond Neptune.

In 2000, that led Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, to leave Pluto out of a display in the planetarium’s newly renovated main gallery. And in 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the cosmic court of last appeal, agreed. With the discovery of many more Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs), some rivaling Pluto in size, the IAU realized it was faced with the possibility of a solar system that could include dozens of planets.

So the term planet, which had never been formally defined, was reframed in a way exquisitely tuned to exclude Pluto and its kin. Not only would something that aspired to be a planet have to orbit the sun and be spherical but it would also have to “clear its neighborhood” of any other bodies of similar size. Pluto failed that last test spectacularly and would thus be busted down to dwarf-planet status. Pluto lovers steamed.

“If those people had been around in 1610 when Galileo discovered there’s an uncountable number of stars,” grumbles Stern, now at the Southwest Research Institute, in Boulder, “they would have restricted it to a number you could remember.”

But while Pluto partisans lost that round, they had already won a much bigger one. In 2001, after Tyson booted Pluto from his main hall, an impromptu “Don’t mess with Pluto” campaign began in astronomy circles. When NASA rejected yet another mission, Stern says, “we mounted an insurrection on every level from the press to little kids to the science community.” He and his team lobbied Congress as well–and that same year, New Horizons got the final thumbs-up.

“You could tell even when we were in grad school together that it was Alan’s destiny to make a Pluto mission happen,” says MIT planetary scientist Richard Binzel, a member of the New Horizons team. “The project is lean and mean, and he runs it with incredible efficiency.”

Tyson, who remains firmly opposed to granting Pluto the planet honorific, agrees and looks forward as eagerly as anyone to the spacecraft’s encounter. “Alan and I are not always on the same side of the argument,” he says, “but then that’s what makes the frontier of any endeavor a vibrant place to be.”

The very thing that reduced Pluto’s official standing–the abundance of other KBOs–actually makes this endeavor even more tantalizing. We used to think there were two zones to the solar system: the rocky inner worlds and the gaseous outer ones. “We now know there’s a third zone,” says Stern, “and Pluto is part of it.”

Given all of Pluto’s Kuiper Belt company, its surface is likely pocked with craters created when smaller KBOs slammed into it; a count of those craters could reveal the frequency of impacts and the sizes of the objects that made them, providing an indirect census of what’s actually in the Kuiper Belt.

Or maybe there won’t be many craters after all. That would suggest that Pluto, long assumed to be totally inert, is geologically active, with slush or even water erupting from underground to create a fresh surface every so often.

There’s also the mystery of how Pluto acquired the largest of its five known moons, Charon. Discovered in 1978, Charon is relatively big–about half the size of Pluto–leading some scientists to consider the pair a double-planet system, not a planet plus a moon. One possible explanation: a large body slammed into Pluto long ago, creating a debris cloud that coalesced to form Charon. Planetary scientists think a similar scenario created Earth’s moon, which means New Horizons could help them understand the Earth-moon system better.

The observations that will yield these answers will be conducted by a suite of onboard instruments measuring Pluto’s atmosphere, surface chemistry, gravity field and more–all with a spacecraft only half the size, two-thirds the weight and about half the cost of Voyager 2 yet with far more powerful capabilities. “We’re going to a whole new world and to a new region of the solar system,” says Stern. “And we’re doing it with 21st century technology. I think it’s as sexy as it gets for a robotic spaceflight.”

But sexy doesn’t mean foolproof, and on July 6, New Horizons had a near death experience when NASA briefly lost contact with the probe, a radio silence that lasted a heart-stopping hour and 21 minutes. The problem was caused by a timing anomaly in one of the spacecraft’s automatic commands–a command that fortunately won’t need to be repeated for any part of the Pluto encounter.

Whatever problems the spacecraft may have had will surely be forgotten once the pictures from New Horizons start flowing in. The images that have arrived so far are still blurry, but Pluto and Charon are already looking sharper than in anything seen before.

The latest surprise: four dark spots evenly spaced along Pluto’s equator, each about the size of Missouri. At closest approach, New Horizons will be able to spot objects as small as a football field, revealing details Tombaugh couldn’t have imagined. (Tombaugh died in 1997; at Stern’s insistence, some of his ashes are onboard New Horizons.)

Once the probe passes Pluto, it will pivot around and continue taking pictures and readings until it is out of range. New Horizons may then set its course for a 2018 or 2019 encounter with a second, smaller KBO. When that is done, the probe could last for decades, just like Voyagers 1 and 2, sending back data from the edge of the solar system.

With the encounter just days away, the New Horizons team has had plenty of time to think about the questions the mission may answer. What they’re more excited about is the possibility of ones they don’t even know enough to ask yet.

Back in 1993, Stern convened a group of planetary scientists to talk about what a mission to Pluto should look like. At dinner, he asked each of them to think of something that the still unnamed probe might find. They wrote their predictions on pieces of paper, then sealed them away. Most of what the scientists wrote concerned highly technical matters–the thermal structure of Pluto’s atmosphere or the mix of isotopes in the surface ice. All of the forecasts–technical and fanciful–will be unwrapped after the encounter and compared with what New Horizons actually finds.

On his paper, Stern simply wrote, “We’ll find something wonderful.” Predictions are not what he does, he explains. “My policy is ‘Let’s just go see what’s there.'”

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The journey to pluto, the farthest world ever explored - alan stern.

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As of 1989, mankind had successfully sent craft to every known planet in the solar system except one: Pluto. Located in an mysterious region called the Kuiper Belt, Pluto is a scientific goldmine, and could hold clues to the formation of our solar system. Alan Stern explains how NASA's New Horizons mission is going to allow us to see Pluto for the first time.

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In the 85 years that humankind has known of Pluto’s existence, the dwarf planet has yet to complete a single revolution around the sun. So far is it from the sun and from Earth that even the most powerful telescopes see it as a blurry disk. Decades of calculating—and speculating—by astronomers have created only a sketchy portrait of the icy rock.

That all changes on Tuesday morning.

At 7:49:58 Eastern time, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will come within 8,000 miles of Pluto—close enough to capture features as small as the docks of Manhattan. Pluto’s exotic ices, nitrogenous atmosphere, and mysterious dark spots will no longer exist merely in the minds of astronomers. They’ll be real.

Not since Voyager 2 in the 1980s have humans explored an entirely new planetary world. “It’s the kind of thing kids will read about in textbooks in the 22nd century,” says Alan Stern, New Horizons’ principal investigator, who has led the mission since NASA chose to embark on it 15 years ago.

Nine and a half of those years were taken up by New Horizons’ 3 billion-mile journey across the solar system. When the little spacecraft launched, Pluto was still a planet. Stern and many Pluto researchers bristle even now at its 2006 demotion to the rank of dwarf planet—an indignity of cosmic proportions. But it’s precisely Pluto’s oddball status that makes it so fascinating.

Unlike the four rocky planets and four gas giants of the solar system, Pluto belongs to the unexplored “third zone” on its fringes, called the Kuiper Belt. Here lie dwarf planets and millions of other icy bodies, frozen remnants of the solar system’s formation. New Horizons has traveled so far, in space and back in time.

A Race Against Time

That New Horizons has made it so far is thanks to two things: the Pluto Underground and how the planets aligned, quite literally.

The Pluto Underground is a group of researchers who gathered over dinner at a Baltimore restaurant in 1989. (It’s been so long they can’t agree over whether the restaurant was seafood or Italian.) Planetary scientists were excited by new Pluto maps, made possible by a once-in-a-century event. For five years beginning in 1985, Pluto and its biggest moon, Charon, passed back and forth in front of each other within Earth’s line of sight. By measuring the light Charon blocked as it eclipsed Pluto, scientists could infer patchy regions of light and dark on the surface of the dwarf planet.

Those maps only made the astronomers more curious: What the hell were those dark regions? “The obvious next step was sending a spacecraft to Pluto, but NASA wasn’t talking about it,” says Marc Buie, a member of the Pluto Underground who is now a co-investigator on New Horizons. The group drew up a strategy to promote a Pluto mission, and Stern became its unofficial leader.

In the next decade, the US rejected four Pluto missions, mostly for budget reasons. And time was running out. Pluto travels in an oval orbit, so from 1989 onward, it has been moving away from the sun—so far away that its atmosphere may freeze, rendering a large part of the scientific mission moot. The next window would not open until 2200. This was the opportunity of a lifetime.

Plus, there was the matter of Jupiter. If positioned right, the astronomers could use the gas giant as a gravity slingshot to speed up the journey to Pluto. Without a gravity assist, the nine-year voyage would be 50 percent longer. A few more years of dawdling and Jupiter would be out of alignment.

What ultimately got New Horizons off the ground was old-fashioned political maneuvering. At one point, Bill Nye the Science Guy lugged postcards bearing notes from thousands of Pluto mission supporters into the US Senate. The biggest breakthrough came in 2002, when the mission appeared at the top of the National Research Council’s Decadal Survey for planetary science—no small thanks to Stern’s lobbying of fellow scientists. New Horizons was officially funded.

With the political battle over, Stern took on the technical challenge of getting New Horizons off the ground—literally—in time for Jupiter’s gravity assist. “A lot of people said, ‘You can’t do this,'” he says. New Horizons had to deal with a punishingly small budget of less than $600 million and a tight schedule (on NASA time, four years is nothing to get a mission launched). Then there was the difficulty of building a probe reliable enough to travel 3 billion miles.

But they did. On January 19, 2006, New Horizons took off atop a huge Atlas V rocket. It is a lean, fast machine—the fastest spacecraft ever launched from Earth. The rocket was flying at 36,373 mph when it left Earth’s atmosphere, and New Horizons reached the moon in just nine hours—Apollo 11 took three days to get there. Exuberance among scientists was equally intense. The wonder inspired by the mission hasn’t waned over the last nine and a half years, even for those not working on New Horizons. “This is really exciting!” says Mark Sykes of the Planetary Science Institute. “I keep using that word, but what else do you call it?”

Pluto Up Close

For such an important astronomical explorer, New Horizons is tiny—just the size of a baby grand piano. “All seven instruments on New Horizons weigh less together than just the camera on the Cassini Saturn probe,” says Stern.

As New Horizons flies by Pluto, those seven instruments will execute a choreographed dance, scooping up as much data as possible. For the craft’s earthly observers, the moment of its closest approach will be mostly quiet: New Horizons will be too busy observing to communicate much with mission control. The mission’s astronomers, gathered at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland—and all of the people watching from afar—will simply have to wait.

“After nine and a half years, so much is riding on the last day,” says Hal Weaver, the mission’s project scientist. “It makes for some nail-biting.” With New Horizons zipping by at 31,000 mph, a piece of debris as small as a grain of rice could punch a fatal hole in the spacecraft. So yes—nail-biting.

If all goes well, the data will begin trickling back to Earth, crossing a void so vast it will take more than four hours for each transmission to reach Maryland. A schedule of what happens exactly when fills four manuals, just one of which runs 50 pages. It’ll take more than a year for the probe to send all that data home: the downlink speed is only two kilobits per second and New Horizons has to share the antennas of NASA’s Deep Space Network with other spacecraft.

Slide: 1 / of 12 . Caption: Caption: The Air Force C-17 cargo plane carrying the New Horizons spacecraft awaits unloading at the Shuttle Landing Facility, Kennedy Space Center, Fla. , early on Sept. 24. 2006.

Slide: 2 / of 12 . Caption: Caption: Mike Lynch of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and Benjamin Rodriguez of the Southwest Research Institute re-install the Solar Wind Around Pluto (SWAP) instrument on NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. Visible above SWAP is the Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation (PEPSSI) instrument; to the right are the telescopic Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) and, with protective red covers, the spacecraft's star-tracking navigation cameras.

Slide: 3 / of 12 . Caption: Caption: This series of New Horizons images of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, was taken at 13 different times spanning 6.5 days, starting on April 12 and ending on April 18, 2015.

Slide: 4 / of 12 . Caption: Caption: NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft roars into the blue sky aboard an Atlas V rocket, January 19, 2006.

Slide: 5 / of 12 . Caption: Caption: Team members at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, MD, move the high-gain antenna assembly toward the New Horizons spacecraft for installation on April 13, 2005.

Slide: 6 / of 12 . Caption: Caption: Artist’s concept of the New Horizons spacecraft as it approaches Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, in July 2015. The craft's miniature cameras, radio science experiment, ultraviolet and infrared spectrometers and space plasma experiments will characterize the global geology and geomorphology of Pluto and Charon, map their surface compositions and temperatures, and examine Pluto's atmosphere in detail. The spacecraft's most prominent design feature is a nearly 7-foot (2.1-meter) dish antenna, through which it will communicate with Earth from as far as 4.7 billion miles (7.5 billion kilometers) away. JHUAPL/SwRI

Slide: 7 / of 12 . Caption: Caption: Recent high-resolution views of Pluto sent by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft.

Slide: 8 / of 12 . Caption: Caption: NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has photographed Kerberos and Styx – the smallest and faintest of Pluto’s five known moons.

Slide: 9 / of 12 . Caption: Caption: Marc Buie, a planetary scientist and observational astronomer from the Southwest Research Institute, demonstrates a model of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft to museum goers and students.

Slide: 10 / of 12 . Caption: Caption: An image of Pluto and Charon from July 8, 2015. NASA/SWRI/JHUAPL

Slide: 11 / of 12 . Caption: Caption: Artist rendering of a satellite approaching Pluto.

Slide: 12 / of 12 . Caption: Caption: Pluto’s Orientation with the Equator and Central Meridian. An annotated image of Pluto indicates features and includes a reference globe showing Pluto’s orientation with the equator and central meridian in bold.

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But the juiciest stuff will come first. Weaver says a close-up of Pluto from the camera on the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) will be among the first items on the list. Another camera, Ralph, will take color photographs of Pluto’s surface (which, by the way, is reddish-brown—not blue, as decades of textbooks would have you believe).

“New Horizons will transform Pluto from an object of the astronomical world to one of the geological and physical world,” says Richard Binzel of MIT, another co-investigator on the mission. That blurry disk of light will soon become a dynamic three-dimensional object. New Horizons might find weather in the form of methane or nitrogen snow. It might find an explanation for the dark spots on Pluto’s surface—possibly the work of cosmic rays hitting methane. And it might gather evidence of a liquid ocean beneath all that ice. Other instruments will also be attuned to Pluto’s atmosphere, analyzing its composition and how it interacts with solar winds.

New Horizons will also observe Pluto’s moons, including Charon, which, at half the diameter of Pluto is so bizarrely big that they form a binary planet system. The two bodies orbit around a single point in space between them. Charon was the only known moon of Pluto when New Horizons launched. Now, scientists have found a total of five.

For Marc Buie, who has been staring at Pluto for decades, the one piece of data he is most excited about is almost laughably basic: size. Measurements of Pluto’s diameter from afar leave about 20 kilometers or so of wiggle room, and that uncertainty affects just about everything else scientists think they know about Pluto, from the structure of its atmosphere to its temperature. “In all of the analyses I’ve done in past the 30 years, my software has something with how big Pluto is,” says Buie. “As soon as we figure it out, the first thing I’ll have to do is rerun everything.”

That’s just how little scientists know about Pluto, pre-New Horizons.

Beyond the Dwarf Planet

New Horizons’ job won’t be done once it passes Pluto. In the fall, mission control will fire up its thrusters and point the spacecraft at one of two objects in the Kuiper Belt—one closer and easier to reach, the other farther away but potentially larger and thus most interesting to visit. Both are smaller than the dwarf planet, and belong to another group of Kuiper Belt objects called the Cold Classicals.

These objects have been undisturbed since the birth of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago; an expedition there has been likened to an archeological dig in space. “This is maybe the most primitive material out there in the solar system,” says Weaver. The mission’s scientists are working out the last details before they make the call on which object to visit.

From there, New Horizons will keep flying and observing until it reaches interstellar space—like the Voyager missions that preceded it. For many of the scientists working on New Horizons, Voyager was the singular inspiration for the Pluto mission. As young students, they watched planets one by one go from dots of light to swirling, celestial bodies. It’s finally Pluto’s turn now—the most remote destination in humanity’s quest to make known the unknown. Says Stern: “We’re going exploring.”

This article was published in July 2015.

Photos and videos courtesy of NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

The Nine Planets

How Far is Pluto From Earth?

You might think that the farthest planet from the Sun , or Earth ,  is Neptune since Neptune is 30 AU or 4.5 billion km / 2.8 billion mi away from us. However, it is actually Pluto who is the farthest planet from the Sun.

Pluto is, on average, 39.5 AU or 5.9 billion km / 3.7 billion mi away from the Sun. Earth is, on average, 1.00 AU or 150 million km / 93 million mi away from the Sun. So how far is Pluto from Earth?

At its most distant point, when Pluto and Earth are on the opposite sides of the Sun from each other, they are separated by about 7.5 billion km / 4.67 billion mi.

The closest approach of Pluto to Earth is when the dwarf planet is at only 4.28 billion km / 2.66 billion mi from us. This is when Pluto is closer to the Sun than even Neptune. 

On average, though, Pluto is 5.05 billion km / 3.1 billion mi away from Earth. This is all due to Pluto’s highly eccentric orbit, which takes it from 30 to 49 AU away from the Sun.

How Long Would It Take to Get to Pluto From Earth?

The distance between Pluto and Earth is, on average, 5.05 billion kilometers / 3.1 billion miles. It is very far away from us. Apart from this, Pluto has an eccentric orbit, which places it either further away or closer to us.

Naturally, we launch a spacecraft towards the planet based upon our predictions of where it will be. Currently, the fastest spacecraft we have developed on Earth was NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, and it actually reached Pluto in just 9.5 years.

Since technology is always evolving, we might actually get to Pluto even faster than this. It takes a bit of time, but eventually, one of the biggest goals of astronomers is to reduce the time involved in such travels.

How Many Light Years does it Take to Get to Pluto?

Pluto is located at around 263.2 light-minutes away from us. It wouldn’t take a light year to reach it. This is the average distance between Pluto and us, and even at its furthest distance from us, it wouldn’t even get near to a light-year away.

Is Pluto or the Sun Closer to Earth?

The Sun is much more closer to Earth than Pluto. Even when Pluto makes its closest approach to the Sun, it is still farther away from us than the Sun.

The Sun is located at around 1.00 AU or 150 million km / 93 million mi away. Pluto, on its nearest approach to us, is still at a whopping 4.28 billion km / 2.66 billion mi from us. Here is a table with the average distance of all the planets and the Sun:

Does Pluto Get Sunlight?

Pluto might seem like a very far away planet, and it really is, but does it get any sunlight due to it being so far away? Of course, it does. Pluto gets around1/1600 as much light from the Sun as Earth does.

In fact, due to its eccentric orbit, Pluto behaves similar to a comet. When the dwarf planet gets at its closest point to the Sun, its atmosphere expands, but it also collapses as it moves further away from the Sun.

When Pluto approaches the Sun, its surface ices sublimate, changing from solid to gas, and rises to create a temporal atmosphere. These gases go up from Pluto’s surface to around 1,670 km / 1,037 mi.

This atmosphere is composed mostly out of nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide. The light from our Sun reaches Pluto in around 5.5 minutes at its average distance.

Did you know?

• Pluto is the first Kuiper Belt object which was discovered, and it is the largest plutoid. The dwarf planet was discovered in 1930 by astronomer Clyde Tombaugh.
• Pluto was classified as a planet for 75 years, occupying the position of the ninth planet of the Solar System.
• Pluto is the ninth-largest and tenth most massive object currently known to orbit the Sun.
• The famous dwarf planet is mostly made out of ice and rock. It is small when compared to our Moon, being only one-sixth of its mass and one-third of its volume.
• Pluto has five named moons orbiting around it, namely Charon, Styx, Kerberos, and Hydra. The largest moon is Charon, and some consider it a dwarf planet rather than a moon.
• Many believe that Pluto and Neptune will one day collide with each other due to their chaotic orbits. However, this will never happen since their orbits are perfectly aligned to avoid such an incident.
• One day on Pluto is the equivalent of 153 hours, while one year on Pluto is the equivalent of 248 years. This is how long it takes for Pluto to orbit our Sun once.
• The first spacecraft that visited Pluto, NASA’s New Horizons, carried the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, the man who discovered the dwarf planet.
• Pluto and its biggest moon, Charon, are quite close to each other. This distance is actually the same as from one side of South America to the last side of North America.

Image Sources:

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• https://useruploads.socratic.org/TW6otA5TPmgyFo5GZStg_a.png
• https://www.scienceabc.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Pluto1.jpg
• https://miro.medium.com/max/960/1*G0G4oCnVt-qepOPPMjcsAA.png

More From Forbes

Pluto smashed into another planet the size of arizona, say scientists.

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Artistic representation of the huge and slow impact on Pluto that led to the heart-shaped Sputnik ... [+] Planitia structure on its surface.

Ever since NASA's New Horizons sent back the first-ever photos of Pluto in 2015, the dwarf planet's mysterious heart-shaped region has puzzled scientists.

New research suggests that Sputnik Planitia, also called Tombaugh Regio, is the result of a massive smash with another planetary body a little over 400 miles in diameter, roughly the size of Arizona from north to south.

Pluto was discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh while he worked at Lowell Observatory in Flagship, Arizona.

Sputnik Planitia is a white basin measuring 750 by 1,250 miles near Pluto's equator that was discovered during the flyby. Although the dwarf planet is covered in an ice shell, that thins significantly at Sputnik Planitia, which scientists had thought contained a subsurface ocean insulated from the dwarf planet’s frozen conditions.

However, this new research— published this week in Nature Astronomy —also suggests that Pluto has no subsurface ocean.

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While the vast majority of Pluto's surface consists of methane ice and its derivatives covering a water-ice crust, “the Planitia is predominantly filled with nitrogen ice, which most likely accumulated quickly after the impact due to the lower altitude," said Harry Ballantyne, a research associate at the University of Bern in Switzerland, and the lead author of the study.

High-resolution view of Pluto Sputnik Planitia, captured by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft.

Pluto’s Core

“Pluto’s core is so cold that the rocks remained very hard and did not melt despite the heat of the impact,” said Ballantyne. “Thanks to the angle of impact and the low velocity, the core of the impactor did not sink into Pluto’s core, but remained intact as a splat on it.”

It’s thought that the shape of Sputnik Planitia and its location at the equator is down to an oblique, rather than a head-on, collision with another planetary body.

Critical Window

“The formation of Sputnik Planitia provides a critical window into the earliest periods of Pluto’s history,” said Adeene Denton, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, who co-authored the paper. “By expanding our investigation to include more unusual formation scenarios, we’ve learned some totally new possibilities for Pluto’s evolution, which could apply to other Kuiper Belt objects as well.”

Kuiper Belt

The Kuiper Belt is a disc-shaped region around the distant outer solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune that’s thought to be populated by icy objects and comets.

Pluto is 40 times further from the sun than Earth, with sunlight taking around 5.5 hours to reach it. It receives just 1/1,600th of the sunlight that Earth gets and temperatures can dip to -400F degrees Fahrenheit.

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.

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Watch the Lyrid Meteor Shower Reach Its Peak

A nearly full moon could interfere with the shower during its peak. It is forecast to be active until near the end of the month.

A long exposure of the night sky over Austria in April 2020 during a Lyrid meteor shower. Credit... Christian Bruna/EPA, via Shutterstock

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By Katrina Miller

• April 19, 2024

Our universe might be chock-full of cosmic wonder, but you can only observe a fraction of astronomical phenomena with your naked eye. Meteor showers, natural fireworks that streak brightly across the night sky, are one of them.

The latest observable meteor shower will be the Lyrids, which have been active since April 14 and are forecast to continue until April 29. They reach their peak April 21 to 22, or Sunday night into Monday morning.

Best seen from the Northern Hemisphere, the Lyrids are caused by the dusty debris from a comet named Thatcher and spring from the constellation Lyra.

During this year’s period of peak activity, viewers may have a more difficult time seeing meteors from this shower because the moon will be nearly full.

Where meteor showers come from

There is a chance you might see a meteor on any given night, but you are most likely to catch one during a shower. Meteor showers are caused by Earth passing through the rubble trailing a comet or asteroid as it swings around the sun. This debris, which can be as small as a grain of sand, leaves behind a glowing stream of light as it burns up in Earth’s atmosphere.

Meteor showers occur around the same time every year and can last for days or weeks. But there is only a small window when each shower is at its peak, which happens when Earth reaches the densest part of the cosmic debris. The peak is the best time to look for a shower. From our point of view on Earth, the meteors will appear to come from the same point in the sky.

The Perseid meteor shower , for example, peaks in mid-August from the constellation Perseus. The Geminids , which occur every December, radiate from the constellation Gemini.

Subscribe to the Times Space and Astronomy Calendar for reminders about meteor showers throughout the year.

How to watch a meteor shower

Michelle Nichols, the director of public observing at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, recommends forgoing the use of telescopes or binoculars while watching a meteor shower.

“You just need your eyes and, ideally, a dark sky,” she said.

That’s because meteors can shoot across large swaths of the sky, so observing equipment can limit your field of view.

Some showers are strong enough to produce up to 100 streaks an hour, according to the American Meteor Society , though you likely won’t see that many.

“Almost everybody is under a light polluted sky,” Ms. Nichols said. “You may think you’re under a dark sky, but in reality, even in a small town, you can have bright lights nearby.”

Planetariums, local astronomy clubs or even maps like this one can help you figure out where to get away from excessive light. The best conditions for catching a meteor shower are a clear sky with no moon or cloud cover, at sometime between midnight and sunrise. (Moonlight affects visibility in the same way as light pollution, washing out fainter sources of light in the sky.) Make sure to give your eyes at least 30 minutes to adjust to seeing in the dark.

Ms. Nichols also recommends wearing layers, even during the summer. “You’re going to be sitting there for quite a while, watching,” she said. “It’s going to get chilly, even in August.”

Bring a cup of cocoa or tea for even more warmth. Then sit back, scan the sky and enjoy the show.

Katrina Miller is a science reporting fellow for The Times. She recently earned her Ph.D. in particle physics from the University of Chicago. More about Katrina Miller

What’s Up in Space and Astronomy

Keep track of things going on in our solar system and all around the universe..

Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other 2024 event  that’s out of this world with  our space and astronomy calendar .

Scientists may have discovered a major flaw in their understanding of dark energy, a mysterious cosmic force . That could be good news for the fate of the universe.

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A nova named T Coronae Borealis lit up the night about 80 years ago. Astronomers say it’s expected to put on another show  in the coming months.

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