New Horizons spacecraft halfway to Pluto
Find out more on NASA's New Horizons Mission page: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html
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If Pluto isn't a planet, what happens to Scorpios? 
Two, any magneto-mystico-mojo "influence" from the body that we call Pluto isn't going to care what label we use to call the thing.
Three, Pluto was discovered in 1930. Astrology has been working - or not - since well before that.
Four, No one is more disappointed than me that we don't have a Planet named Eris.
Five, I don't think you were serious when you said you were serious. But I dig scorpios, man. Not everyone does! But then I'm a Gemini, so I never know what to expect.
Six, you should ask Mr. Scorpio.
And the Planet or Dwarf Planet or Kuiper Belt Object or Trans-Neptunian Object in question is actually named Eris, for the troublesome (or unfairly maligned, as we Erisian devotees of our Fair Lady steadfastly feel) Greek Goddess of discord or chaos.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eris_(dwarf_planet)
leading me to suspect that Mike Brown may be a Robert Anton Wilson fan. But I digress.
And whatever the hell it is, it's bigger than Pluto.
I always thought Eris sounded kind of sexy in an evil sort of way; although she also sounds like someone you wouldn't want to get involved with, sort of the ex-girlfriend-from-Hell.
Neil deGrasse Tyson received hate mail, and even death threats, when he campaigned to keep Pluto from being referred to as "the ninth planet." I mean, it's not like this is football, you know! 
Pluto has been demoted to the status of dwarf planet, meaning that:
- it's big enough for its internal gravity to pull it into a spherical shape, and
- not large enough for its gravity to 'clear out' smaller bodies in its orbit.
To complicate things even more, all of the dwarf planets, except Ceres, are Plutoids, which simply means the major axis of their orbits lies outside the orbit of Uranus.
Ceres and Pluto are the only dwarf planets we're likely to get close looks at in the foreseeable future; there are spacecraft on the way to each body: New Horizons to Pluto and Dawn to Ceres.
People think "oh, asteroid belt, ho hum".. But it may be far more interesting than just a big ball of rock.
Last edited Fri Jul 12, 2013, 12:49 AM - Edit history (1)
The space payload for New Horizons includes Ralph, Alice, REX, and LORRI. Yes, it's a SWAP, but why is PEPPSI involved - things could get sticky. After all that fooling around, somebody has to cleanup - who better than a student?
Ralph: Visible and infrared imager/spectrometer; provides color, composition and thermal maps.
Alice: Ultraviolet imaging spectrometer; analyzes composition and structure of Pluto's atmosphere and looks for atmospheres around Charon and Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs).
REX: (Radio Science EXperiment) Measures atmospheric composition and temperature; passive radiometer.
LORRI: (Long Range Reconnaissance Imager) telescopic camera; obtains encounter data at long distances, maps Pluto's farside and provides high resolution geologic data.
SWAP: (Solar Wind Around Pluto) Solar wind and plasma spectrometer; measures atmospheric "escape rate" and observes Pluto's interaction with solar wind.
PEPSSI: (Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation) Energetic particle spectrometer; measures the composition and density of plasma (ions) escaping from Pluto's atmosphere.
SDC: (Student Dust Counter) Built and operated by students; measures the space dust peppering New Horizons during its voyage across the solar system.
Right, the theme of those acronyms is just a coincidence.
Sure, this is the story NASA tells:
...but I think those crazy science folk at NASA are just hoping that the spacecraft they launched that looks like this:
...will send back a lot of photos and data about this:
Thanks for the post, LTH. I don't recall what I was doing on Jan. 19, 2006, but this is the first time I knew that our wonderful people at NASA had a mission to understand the (now ex-) planet of Pluto.
