Far-Out Facts about Pluto

Pluto is the ninth planet in our solar system, probably the last. It is 3.5 billion miles from the sun (so even if you traveled from when you were a baby to when you were dead, you'd never get there)! It takes Pluto 90,465 days for it to orbit the sun once, so one year on Pluto is 248 Earth years! So if you happen to be 248 years old, go to Pluto and you'll only be one year old -- you're a baby again! Without the Hubble telescope, it can be hard to tell Pluto from the stars.

You would not want to go to school on Pluto because one day on Pluto would be six days on Earth! Pluto is smaller than our moon, barely over 1,300 miles in diameter. It has a tiny moon named Charon which wasn't discovered until 1978. Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930. The average temperature on Pluto is -390 degrees F (-234 degrees C). The atmosphere is made up mostly of nitrogen and methane.

Pluto has not been visited by spacecraft once since we realized it was there! But, in 2016, if all goes well, a spacecraft will land on Pluto. It will take the space craft 10 years to reach Pluto. It has a big dish antenna on top, and miniature cameras.

Sources

Information on this page came from:

David Holtzman, LOOK! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a planet! It's a ... very large ball of ice!", Smithsonian Magazine, Volume 32, Number 12, March 2002.
"Team plots a faster path to Pluto for robotic probe", Johns Hopkins University news release, posted February 22, 2002, http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0202/22plutopath/.
This page's background image shows Pluto and Charon. It comes from http://pauldunn.dynip.com/solarsystem/image/pluto.gif

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