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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.
An artist's impression of Pluto 350. Another mission concept, known as Pluto 350, was developed by Robert Farquhar of the Goddard Space Flight Center, with Alan Stern and Fran Bagenal of the Pluto Underground, who both served as study scientists for the project. Pluto 350 aimed to send a spacecraft, weighing around 350 kilograms, to Pluto. [11]
Appointed as the project's principal investigator, Stern was described by Krimigis as "the personification of the Pluto mission". [30] New Horizons was based largely on Stern's work since Pluto 350 and involved most of the team from Pluto Kuiper Express. [31] The New Horizons proposal was one of five that were officially submitted to NASA. It ...
Observations by the James Webb Space Telescope are giving scientists a fuller understanding about the composition and evolution of Pluto's moon Charon, the largest moon orbiting any of our solar ...
NASA launched the New Horizon spacecraft in 2006 to learn more about the icy dwarf planet Pluto. Here are some of the first photos from that mission, taken from between 125 and 115 million miles away.
A probe designed to land on Pluto, similar to the proposed Triton Hopper mission. N/A [19] Mariner Mark II: NASA: N/A [a] N/A [a] Proposed family of spacecraft intended to explore dwarf planets and trans-Neptunian objects, later replaced by the lower-cost Discovery Program. N/A: N/A New Horizons 2: NASA: N/A: Flyby
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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]