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Pluto, discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930, is an interesting target for planetary exploration, but Pluto presents significant challenges for exploration because of its small mass and great distance from Earth. In 1964, Gary Flandro of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory proposed a mission called Grand Tour, taking advantage of the fact that an ...
Geography of Pluto. The geography of Pluto refers to the study and mapping of physical features across the dwarf planet Pluto. On 14 July 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft became the first spacecraft to fly by Pluto. [1][2] During its brief flyby, New Horizons made detailed geographical measurements and observations of Pluto and its moons. [3]
Pluto (minor-planet designation: 134340 Pluto) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is the ninth-largest and tenth-most- massive known object to directly orbit the Sun. It is the largest known trans-Neptunian object by volume, by a small margin, but is less massive than Eris.
Geology of Pluto. The geology of Pluto consists of the characteristics of the surface, crust, and interior of Pluto. Because of Pluto's distance from Earth, in-depth study from Earth is difficult. Many details about Pluto remained unknown until 14 July 2015, when New Horizons flew through the Pluto system and began transmitting data back to ...
New Horizons is an interplanetary space probe launched as a part of NASA 's New Frontiers program. [5] Engineered by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), with a team led by Alan Stern, [6] the spacecraft was launched in 2006 with the primary mission to perform a flyby study ...
A map of Charon with IAU names Comparison between Pluto's Sputnik Planitia and Charon's informally named Vulcan Planitia. Unlike Pluto's surface, which is composed of nitrogen and methane ices, Charon's surface appears to be dominated by the less volatile water ice.
List of geological features on Pluto. A map of Pluto showing the names officially approved by the IAU as of 3 February 2021. This is a list of named geological features on Pluto, identified by scientists working with data from the New Horizons spacecraft. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) officially approved the first 14 names on 8 ...
t. e. The Kuiper belt (/ ˈkaɪpər / KY-pər) [1] is a circumstellar disc in the outer Solar System, extending from the orbit of Neptune at 30 astronomical units (AU) to approximately 50 AU from the Sun. [2] It is similar to the asteroid belt, but is far larger—20 times as wide and 20–200 times as massive. [3][4] Like the asteroid belt, it ...