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Pluto and Charon are sometimes considered a binary system because the barycenter of their orbits does not lie within either body, and they are tidally locked. New Horizons was the first spacecraft to visit Pluto and its moons, making a flyby on July 14, 2015, and taking detailed measurements and observations.
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 ...
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 ...
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 .
New Mexico State University Board of Regents Medal (1980) Rittenhouse Medal (1990) Clyde William Tombaugh / ˈtɒmbaʊ / (February 4, 1906 – January 17, 1997) was an American astronomer. He discovered the ninth planet Pluto in 1930, the first object to be discovered in what would later be identified as the Kuiper belt.
A simulated view of the Pluto–Charon system showing that Pluto orbits a point outside itself. Also visible is the mutual tidal locking between the two bodies. Charon and Pluto orbit each other every 6.387 days. The two objects are gravitationally locked to one another, so each keeps the same face towards the other. This is a case of mutual ...
Pluto Kuiper Express was an interplanetary space probe that was proposed by Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) scientists and engineers and under development by NASA. The spacecraft was intended to be launched to study Pluto and its moon Charon, along with one or more other Kuiper belt objects (KBOs). The proposal was the third of its kind, after ...
Nix is a natural satellite of Pluto, with a diameter of 49.8 km (30.9 mi) across its longest dimension. [3] It was discovered along with Pluto's outermost moon Hydra on 15 May 2005 by astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope, [1] and was named after Nyx, the Greek goddess of the night. [10] Nix is the third moon of Pluto by distance ...