NASA's Tuesday morning flyby with its New Horizons deep-space satellite has a lot of people asking "What's up with Pluto?"
Officially, the dwarf planet is not considered part of the main solar system we share with Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. There is at least one Texas A&M lecturer, however, who isn't ready to sever ties.
"As far as I'm concerned [and many other people too], Pluto is still a planet," Kevin Krisciunas wrote Wednesday in an email.
In 1930, astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in what Krisciunas described as the old-fashioned way. For decades, the tiny outlier orbiting an average of 3.6 billion miles -- 40 times the distance between the sun and Earth -- was a welcomed member of our solar system. NASA experts estimate Pluto to be about 1,400 miles wide -- half the width of America.
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Six years after Tombaugh's death in 1997, another astronomer discovered a similar planet beyond Pluto. In fact, Pluto has two sister planets, Eris and Makemake, beyond its elliptical orbit, according to NASA's website. The discovery in 2003 prompted the astro-community to reclassify these three dwarf planets as plutoids, which orbit beyond Neptune.
Regardless of classification, the science community as a whole is celebrating Tuesday's flyby as a landmark achievement in space exploration.
"Even with adaptive optics on the world's biggest ground-based telescopes, or the Hubble Space Telescope, a flyby gives much better images," Krisciunas said.
The New York Times reported Wednesday that images from New Horizon revealed ice mountains on the surface of Pluto.
Krisciunas said the discoveries by New Horizon will better inform scientists of how these planets form. The Aggie lecturer said Earth and Pluto share a similar trait in that our moons are quite large. Of course, Pluto has quite a few moons orbiting it: Charon, Nix and Hydra.
As New Horizon continues on, NASA's project leaders have said the satellite will capture more images in the Kuiper Belt, where Pluto and other plutoids can be found.
Some experts argue more achievements like New Horizons' flyby won't likely occur in our lifetime, and Krisciunas agrees, to a point.
He said it took scientists 15 years to convince NASA to build New Horizons and another six years to complete and launch the project.
"Budget constraints stipulate this idea: 'We've already visited all the worlds in our solar system, so why do it again anytime soon?'" he wrote.
Still, Krisciunas said that won't keep scientists from continuing to reach for the stars.
"As Robert Browning wrote, 'A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?'
"We humans won't be traveling beyond the solar system anytime soon, but the New Horizons satellite shows us the way."