New Horizons launches from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station aboard an Atlas V rocket in 2006 a journey of more than 3 billion miles 4 8 billion kilometers to reach Pluto and take pictures of the dwarf planet This was the longest mission to a planet in the history of space travel New Horizons zoomed away from Earth at more than 36,000 miles 58,000 km per hour making it one of the fastest spacecraft in history Before the New Horizons launch mission lead scientist Alan Stern said the mission would be the crowning achievement of NASA’s exploration of the solar system It would also be one of the most ambitious It takes us 4 billion miles 6 billion km away and 4 billion years back in time he said When New Horizons finally reached Pluto in July 2015 the pictures it sent back stunned astronomers The information made scientists rethink much of what they had once thought about the former planet But the new information was also fascinating and exciting 6
New Horizons took this photo top from a distance of 50,000 miles 80,500 km above Pluto’s surface In the image below taken by New Horizons in 2006 during its journey a white arrow points to Pluto It’s always fun to have your models validated but it is way more fun to have them trashed said planetary scientist Randy Gladstone Finding out you are completely wrong is a great part of science 7
CHAPTER 1 DISCOVERING PLUTO Percival Lowell observes Venus through a telescope at the Lowell Observatory Shortly after the planet Neptune was discovered in 1846 astronomers began debating whether there might be a ninth planet farther out in the solar system There seemed to be something other than Neptune affecting the orbit of Uranus One of the big believers in a ninth planet was a rich Bostonian named Percival Lowell He was an avid astronomer who built an observatory in Flagstaff Arizona in 1894 He began searching for the ninth planet from his observatory in 1906 8
This building is part of the Lowell Observatory in Arizona Lowell and a team of astronomers searched the skies for Planet X from their base at the Lowell Observatory With a telescope they took pictures of the sky every night Lowell never found the planet but he searched until his death in 1916 In the late 1920s a special photographic telescope known as an astrograph was built at the Lowell Observatory to search again for This telescope at the Lowell Observatory was used to discover Pluto
