Pluto as our technology improved.
I won’t deny being late to the party when it comes to all the Pluto hype. I’ve been busy taking care of my health and cleaning up affairs key to the maintenance of the Maggi Republic. I have been an Astronomy geek since I was a little kid and this probe taking nine years to get there was something I mentioned during my site’s first year, I’m not letting the matter go! Lastly, the dwarf planet was discovered by a dude from Streator, IL which is near my maternal grandparents’ stomping grounds of Seneca and Marsielles.
Below is a bitchin’ movie showing how far New Horizons traveled to arrive. I love how you see the mile-markers and orbits that were crossed.
Pluto’s visibility, “neighborhood” and other facts have come a long way from when I was a child. In the Seventies, I recall there weren’t many specifics. You just had to trust Science books about the dwarf planet. When I was in sixth grade, we had to do presentations about the various worlds in our solar system. Only one classmate took Pluto. I felt bad for her because there wasn’t must to tell in 1980 while I crushed the other kids over Jupiter thanks to my parents having a sub to National Geographic! OK, the classmate did bring up how Neptune had taken Pluto’s spot as the farthest object sometime in 1979 and they’d swap back in 1999.
When it comes to Sci-Fi, only three franchises have ever bothered to cover Pluto in any detail. The first was Star Blazers (the Americanized version of Space Battleship Yamato). The Gammilons used Pluto as their foothold against us. From there the aliens defeated the Earth Defense Force’s last space fleet under Captain Avatar and launched numerous radioactive planet bombs prepare Earth for colonization. Don’t ask me, it was a Japanese cartoon. When the Argo did arrive, the only thing the show guessed correctly was Pluto being icy. Rather a no duh moment. Next was Futurama taking a more comical stab at the place being a penguin sanctuary contaminated by an Exxon Valdez-like spill thanks to Bender’s soberness when he was at the helm. The last is in my header, Rick and Morty had Pluto and their “not-a-planet” denying government leading the A story paralleling our world’s whole climate-change denialism. The Plutonian government’s argument against Plutonian scientists was the rather dumb Jerry just saying, “Pluto is a planet” to counter the world’s shrinkage.
Yeah, I know, those are fiction. My point is how fiction tried to fill the gaps on an object Hubble can’t even get a solid look at.
Next up for New Horizons is even more exciting. We should get a better idea about the boundaries of the Heliosphere. Does it adjust? Is it constant? This probe is much more sophisticated than Voyager 1 and 2. I think its chances in what may be actual, interstellar space are stronger.