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The concept of human exploration of dwarf planets has intrigued scientists since Pluto's discovery in 1930. Despite the vast distances and significant challenges, advancements in space technology could make such endeavors possible. Colonizing dwarf planets offers potential economic benefits due to the presence of rare and valuable ores. [23]
The prototypical dwarf planet is Pluto, which for decades was regarded as a planet before the "dwarf" concept was adopted in 2006. Dwarf planets are capable of being geologically active, an expectation that was borne out in 2015 by the Dawn mission to Ceres and the New Horizons mission to Pluto.
Quaoar's diameter is roughly half that of Pluto and is slightly smaller than Pluto's moon Charon. [29] At the time of its discovery in 2002, Quaoar was the largest object found in the Solar System since the discovery of Pluto. [29] Quaoar was also the first trans-Neptunian object to be measured directly from Hubble Space Telescope images. [19]
It is about half the diameter and an eighth the mass of Pluto, a dwarf planet that resides in a frigid region of the outer Solar System called the Kuiper Belt, beyond the most distant planet Neptune.
On December 28, 2004, Mike Brown and his team discovered Haumea on images they had taken with the 1.3 m SMARTS Telescope from the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile at the Palomar Observatory in the United States on May 6, 2004, while looking for what he hoped would be the tenth planet. The Caltech discovery team used the nickname ...
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.
By RYAN GORMAN Scientists may have found Planet X -- the long-rumored object believed to be larger than Earth and further from the sun than Pluto. Planet X and another object dubbed "Planet Y ...
15760 Albion (provisional designation 1992 QB 1) was the first trans-Neptunian object to be discovered after Pluto and Charon. Measuring about 108–167 kilometres in diameter, it was discovered in 1992 by David C. Jewitt and Jane X. Luu at the Mauna Kea Observatory, Hawaii. After the discovery, they dubbed the object "Smiley" and it was ...