Pluto for the Ages
Poor Pluto.
It was once the best-known, smallest and farthest planet in our solar system, a proud symbol of the modern atomic age. Today, Pluto has been relegated to non-planet status and, if we bother to think about Pluto at all, it's because its small moon, Nix, makes a crazy, chaotic orbit that looks like a football wobbling on a string.
But Pluto may be making a comeback. On Tuesday, NASA's spacecraft New Horizons flies by Pluto after a journey of 91/2 years.
"We've known about Pluto since 1930, but this is the first time we're getting good close-up pictures of it," said Marc Taylor, manager of planetarium and science programs at Hudson River Museum in Yonkers. "This is the farthest thing we've ever seen close-up."
And everybody loves an underdog. Once considered the ninth planet in our solar system, astronomy enthusiasts took it as a personal affront when it was disqualified in 2006. For some, including Alan Stern, the principal investigator for the New Horizons mission, the debate over Pluto's planet status is still continuing. He's at odds with Michael Brown, who discovered another similarly sized celestial object, Eris, in the same belt as Pluto and started the astronomy community down the road toward demoting both to the also-ran title of dwarf planet. Brown's book is titled, "How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming."
TIMELINE :The Pluto system
ARRIVAL:Applause as NASA Pluto probe 'calls home'
John Huibregtse, the director for Challenger Learning Center in Ramapo and who closely follows the mission, said in the upcoming summer camp at the center that he plans to use the Pluto flyby as a teachable moment about the evolving nature of science.
"Science isn't just learning a bunch of facts out of a book. Science is a process. It's a way to learn more about the world and understand the world," Huibregtse said. "Here you have two scientists who are in a debate, ... and they are debating over whether Pluto is a planet, and what's the definition of a planet. And off course, things can change — that's the nature of science. So we'd like to get that across the kids."
He won't have to convince Ian Leinbach, 17, a recent Nyack High School graduate.
"I'm not really tied to Pluto being either a planet or a dwarf planet," Leinbach said. "I'm hoping that as we go forward, we can change between the two without too much debate, without too much complaining about the semantics of it, ... especially when we're going to find out more about Pluto as New Horizons reaching Pluto and sending back pictures."
Pluto was discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh, an American astronomer at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and it was named after the Roman god of the underworld. In Greek mythology, the corresponding god is Hades.
Because Pluto was the newest planet, the name carried a sense of "modernity and excitement," said Robert Thompson, the founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University.
"We've got this first idea of Pluto as 'expanding our neighborhood' and the 'idea of discovering things far away,'" Thompson said.
"Shortly after that, there was tendency to name newly discovered elements after planets — Neptunium, Uranium, and Plutonium," Thompson said. "Plutonium was not named after the god of the underworld, although it would have been a good thing to be named after given what plutonium is capable of doing."
Soon after Pluto's discovery, Disney named its cartoon dog Pluto. It's not clear whether the dog was named after the god or the planet. But the dog, officially known as Pluto the Pup, became better known than the planet, said Thompson.
The name Pluto soared in popularity in the following decades; it was used for an Astro Boy character and a federal project to develop a nuclear-powered engine for cruise missiles. As time went on, some people even came to believe that the planet was named after the pup.
Hard times came for Pluto in August 2006, when the International Astronomical Union (IAU) General Assembly adopted a resolution to reclassify it as a dwarf planet because it didn't satisfy one of the three newly defined criteria to be a planet. Those who opposed Pluto's demotion called the criteria — one of which stipulates that a planet must dominate its solar neighborhood — either arbitrary or irrelevant.
The IAU's decision, which meant to end years of debate over Pluto's status, caused a public outcry.
After all, every school child had learned the phrase, "My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas," to keep the order of the planets straight, and now it just didn't make sense.
"What's our Very Educated Mother going to serve us?" asked Larry Faltz, Westchester Amateur Astronomers president, in his recent news letter article about Pluto's demotion. ("Nachos" is one suggestion.) "When the deed was done by the IAU in 2006, it was hard not to view it as some kind of ... challenge to our genial enthusiasm for the newest member of the family and our liberal affinity for outsiders and underdogs," he wrote.
Interactive :Pluto revealed
But after spending sometime considering the IAU's ruling, he accepted it, Faltz said.
"Things change, and we have to adjust," Faltz said.
But the change turned out to be still hard to swallow for others, including Ed Siemenn of the Rockland Astronomy Club.
"I am disappointed over the reclassification," Siemenn said. "To me, Pluto will always be a planet, and I still refer to it as a planet. I feel awkward calling it anything other than the planet. I grew up in the age when there were nine planets."
Thompson, of Syracuse University, echoed Siemenn's sentiment.
"I'm 55 years old, and as far as I'm concerned, Pluto still is a planet," Thompson said. "I took so many tests as a kid where I had to draw the nine planets and label the nine planets. I learned there were nine planets. I don't respond well to change, maybe."
Sophia Peluso, a Yonkers High School sophomore who was 7 when Pluto got the ax, said she still feels sad about her favorite planet being demoted.
"I really like Pluto because it's tiny, and I really like underdog-types of things," said Peluso, who is a junior docent at Hudson River Museum in Yonkers. "I don't see the benefit of Pluto not being a planet. It's screwing up the whole acronym."
New Horizons, which launched Jan. 19, 2006, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, is approaching Pluto — currently located about 3 billion miles away from Earth — at the speed of 30,000 miles per hour.
The spaceship is equipped with instruments to map the geology of Pluto and Charon, the largest of the five known moons in the Pluto system. It would also measure surface temperatures, examine Pluto's atmosphere and search for an atmosphere around Charon.
Charon is quite large and orbits close to its parent, Pluto. The local planetary region is therefore sometimes called a double-planet system.
It's the shifting gravitational field between Pluto and Charon that causes Nix to wobble so unpredictably, as does Hydra, another of Pluto's small moons. Both are football-shaped and both flip and turn in no appreciable pattern, as was discovered following recent analysis of imagery taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Researchers say that a combination of data from Hubble, New Horizons' brief close-up look, and future observations with the James Webb Space Telescope will help settle many mysteries of the Pluto-Charon system.
New Horizons is designed to gather as much data as it can with its one-shot approach to its target. In other words, New Horizons is not going to orbit around Pluto, just flying by. Although the spacecraft will send some photos and information home in the days just before and after the closest approach to Pluto, it will keep sending more data stored in onboard memory for the following 16 months.
Members of the Rockland Astronomy Club have been getting ready for the historic event for more than a year. They invited Stern, the mission's chief investigator, to the 2014 North East Astronomy Forum, which is the club's annual astronomy event in Suffern. Stern extensively spoke about the New Horizons mission and his disagreement with Pluto's reclassification.
"In my generation, Pluto was always a fascinating planet. It was very mysterious because it was a planet we knew the least about, and it was the farthest away," said Siemenn, who heads the club, noting that all other planets in the solar system over the years have been visited by a spacecraft, but not Pluto.
Data from New Horizons would help understand the history of the solar system, including Earth, said Faltz, Westchester Amateur Astronomers president.
"They can learn a lot about some of the conditions that were probably present at the beginning of the solar system," Faltz said. "That's important because it defines how water got on the earth."
In advance to the Pluto flyby, models of Pluto and Charon have been installed at Hudson River Museum. Although they have no colors on the surface at this point, the models would be painted to reflect the new findings, Taylor said.
Eid Alrabadi, 17, a Palisades Preparatory School junior and a Hudson River Museum junior docent, said he's awaiting for information from New Horizons.
"I hope we find something, new life or some signs of things that used to live there," Alrabadi said.
Think about it. It's been nearly a decade since New Horizons left in January 2006. George W. Bush was president. Mad Men didn't exist. Twitter Inc. launched in March that year. And until August 2006, Pluto was still a planet.
Here are a few local things that have changed.
January 2006
Pluto was a planet.
Westchester, Rockland and Putnam counties were headed by Andrew Spano, C. Scott Vanderhoef, and Robert Bondi, respectively.
Discussion over Yonkers' plan to build a minor-league baseball stadium was ongoing.
Ramapo's plan to build a minor-league baseball stadium wasn't known in public.
Nathan's in Yonkers was open.
White Plains has no Walmart or Ritz-Carlton.
July 2015
Pluto is not a planet.
Westchester, Rockland and Putnam counties are headed by Robert Astorino, Ed Day and MaryEllen Odell, respectively.
Yonkers' plan for a minor-league baseball stadium is long dead.
Ramapo has a minor-league baseball stadium.
Walter's debuts its hot dog truck.
White Plains has Walmart, which opened in August 2006, and Ritz-Carlton, which opened in December 2007.
The Pluto system timeline
1930: Pluto discovered
1954: Pluto's 6.4 day rotation period discovered
1965: Pluto's 3:2 orbit resonance with Neptune discovered
1976: Discovery of methane ice on Pluto
1978: Charon discovered; mass of Pluto-Charon determined
1987: Water-ice discovered on Charon's surface
1988: Discovery that Pluto's orbit is chaotic
1992: Nitrogen and carbon monoxide ices found on Pluto
2005: Nix and Hydra discovered
2006: NASA's New Horizons spacecraft launched. Pluto reclassified as a dwarf planet
2011: Kerberos discovered
2012: Styx discovered
2015: New Horizons arrives at Pluto
Source: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
• The Hudson River Museum at 511 Warburton Ave., Yonkers, will have free planetarium shows at 7 p.m. every Fridays and Saturdays through Sept. 4, which will include talks on discoveries from the New Horizons mission. Call 914-963-4550 or visit the website http://www.hrm.org for more information.
• Ramapo's Challenger Learning Center at 225 Route 59 will have a planetarium show at 2 p.m. July 12. The event is open to the public and will include a movie, a star show and talks on New Horizon's Pluto flyby. Call the center at 845-357-3416 or visit the website http://www.lhvcc.com for more information.