Pluto-mania is catching on as the New Horizons space probe closes in on the former planet, now dwarf planet. Yeah, some idiot earthlings came up with that because somehow a world with at least 5 moons orbiting it isn't a "planet". Anyhoo, it's the first time an earth vehicle has ever visited Pluto so we're all going to get to see what it's all about for the first time ever.
Pluto was discovered on February 18, 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh. Not only was Tombaugh the first to discover Pluto, he will also be the first to ever visit Pluto. Well, at least his ashes will as they are aboard New Horizons.
Being over 3 BILLION miles away from the sun, Pluto is a cold, cold planet. The average low temperature on the surface of Pluto is -387°F. Game of Thrones winters have got nothing on Pluto's winters. Daytime highs, however, reach a balmy -369°F. Being over 3 billion miles away from the sun, it takes the light from the sun 4.3 hours to reach Pluto and daylight on Pluto is about as bright as a moonlit night on earth. You can see stars in the daytime, provided you're far enough away from big Plutonian city lights.
It's hard to grasp these kinds of distances, especially when we grew up with solar system models in school that had all the planets lined up in a row. Those models were nowhere close in scale to giving us an inkling of the distances between planets. To be fair though, there's really no way schools could have made a model to suffice. To do so they would have had to tell us that if the earth was the size of a basketball, Pluto would be the size of a golf ball. They would then have to place that basketball representing earth, in downtown Houston, TX. Then they'd have to take the golf ball representing Pluto and place it on Seawall Blvd. in Galveston, TX for a true scale of the distance between the two.
New Horizons, about the size of a grand piano, was launched in 2006 on the fastest rocket ever made. New Horizons used Jupiter's orbit to help it pick up speed and at over 31,000 mph, it has taken New Horizon's 9 years to reach Pluto.
The pictures New Horizons takes will be sent back to earth via radio waves which will take 4 1/2 hours. Then it will only be able to be downloaded at 1kb per second. That's 56 times slower than those dialup internet connections we used to have.
If you were going to drive to Pluto and you could do it without ever stopping for gas or restrooms and your average speed was 70 mph, it would take you 4,892 YEARS to get to Pluto.
A day on earth is 24 hours, meaning that's how long it takes the earth to make one full rotation. A day on Pluto takes over 6 earth days. Great for weekends and holidays but Mondays on Pluto have got to be the worst. Pluto also spins in the opposite direction of earth, meaning the sun rises in the west and sets in the east.
365 days is one year here on earth, a complete cycle around the sun. It takes Pluto 248 YEARS to circle the sun. 90,410 earth days make a year on Pluto. And amazingly February still has just 28 days on both planets.
One year ago on Pluto, the United States wasn't even a country yet. We were about 8 years from declaring independence from Great Britain, we were 134 years from the Wright Brothers 1st flight, and over 200 years from landing on our own moon. All within one year on Pluto. In Pluto time, Christ walked the earth just 8 years ago.
A 200 lb. person on earth would weigh a little over 13 lbs. on Pluto. New Horizons can go ahead and send that Plutonian diet back to earth pronto! Basketball players would be able to dunk on a 150 foot high goal. Probably have to lower it to about 147 feet for me.
So, that's probably more than you ever needed to know about something that's over 3 billion miles away from you, but now you know. And there's a lot more we'll learn in the coming days as New Horizons starts sending data back home.
Na-Nu, Na-Nu!
