The Scrapbook is delighted by the success of NASA’s New Horizons project to send a spacecraft all the way to the edge of the solar system—-indeed, just a few thousand miles from the surface of Pluto, which we now see with astonishing clarity.
This is an extraordinary feat of engineering: Pluto is three billion miles from Earth, and New Horizons was launched on its 31,000-mile-an-hour journey in January 2006. It arrived at its destination with exact precision, and the photographic -images of Pluto we now possess are not only awe-inspiring but an astronomical breakthrough. The surface of Pluto is now usefully visible, revealing ridges, mountain ranges, probable snowfields, evidence of likely tectonic activity, and a curious heart-shaped feature that might be the remnant of some ancient collision.
The Scrapbook is pleased not just for NASA’s achievement, which reminds us of the grandeur of space exploration, but because, like more than a few of its fellow countrymen, it has a soft spot for Pluto. Up until a decade ago, tiny, frigid Pluto was considered the ninth, and outermost, planet in the solar system and was the only one discovered by an American, the 24-year-old astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, in 1930. But in the very year that New Horizons departed from Earth, the International Astronomical Union ruled that Pluto fails to qualify as a planet because, despite its spherical shape and solar orbit, it does not “dominate” its orbit, being affected by other objects and space debris.
Accordingly, and to the deep distress of Pluto’s friends and admirers, the IAU downgraded Pluto to “dwarf planet” status.
Well, as is sometimes the case, the settled scientific consensus isn’t quite what it’s cracked up to be. To begin with, a slight adjustment of its location would, in fact, allow Pluto to “dominate” its orbit—it seems no more vulnerable to asteroids than Earth—and the Kuiper belt, Pluto’s neighborhood and home to fellow dwarf planets, appears to harbor fewer objects than first recorded. So there is a case to be made for restoring Pluto’s status, and New Horizons’s photographs will do that case no harm.
After all, who can forget that, between 1973 and 1995, the pedants at the American Ornithologists’ Union insisted on renaming the Baltimore oriole—and for “scientific” reasons that turned out to be mistaken? Or that the killjoys at the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature remain determined to deep-six the name of Brontosaurus—beloved “thunder lizard” of the Late Jurassic period—in favor of the awkward, obscure Apatosaurus?
In the struggle to preserve our solar system as we’ve known it, New Horizons gives us die-hard Plutonians fresh ammunition.
