Pluto is a complex and mysterious world with mountains, valleys, plains, craters, and maybe glaciers. Discovered in 1930, Pluto was long considered our solar system's ninth planet. But after the discovery of similar intriguing worlds deeper in the distant Kuiper Belt, icy Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet.  Pluto is named after the Roman god of the underworld.  Pluto is orbited by five known moons, the largest of which is Charon. Charon is about half the size of Pluto itself, making it the largest satellite relative to the planet it orbits in our solar system. Pluto and Charon are often referred to as a "double planet."  NASA's New Horizons spacecraft was the first spacecraft to explore Pluto up close, flying by the dwarf planet and its moons on July 14, 2015.

(134340) Pluto

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The Hubble Space Telescope is a cooperative program of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to operate a long-lived space-based observatory for the benefit of the international astronomical community. HST is an observatory first dreamt of in the 1940s, designed and built in the 1970s and 80s, and operational only in the 1990s. Since its preliminary inception, HST was designed to be a different type of mission for NASA. A permanent space-based observatory. To accomplish this goal and protect the spacecraft against instrument and equipment failures, NASA had always planned on regular servicing missions. Hubble has special grapple fixtures, 76 handholds, and stabilized in all three axes. HST is a 2.4-meter reflecting telescope which was deployed in low-Earth orbit (600 kilometers) by the crew of the space shuttle Discovery (STS-31) on 25 April 1990.

New Horizons is a robotic spacecraft mission conducted by NASA. It was the first spacecraft to fly by and study the dwarf planet Pluto and its moons, Charon, Nix and Hydra. After the successfull flyby of Pluto, the spacecraft continued on for a Jan 2019 flyby of as part of the New Horizons Kuiper Belt Extended Mission (KEM). The mission was prepared primarily by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). New Horizons was successfully launched on January 19, 2006. After a flyby of Jupiter on February 28, 2007 at 5:43:40 UTC, New Horizons is expected to arrive at Pluto in July 2015. As New Horizons passed through the Jovian system for a gravity assist in February, it performed scientific observations of Jupiter, the Galilean satellites, the Jovian rings, Himalia, Elara, and Earth.

(134340) Pluto Information Page

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