ALL good things come to an end. And July 14th will see the finale of the Heroic Age of space exploration. On that day a visitor from Earth will fly past Pluto and head off into the Kuiper belt—the icy, rubble-strewn fringe of the sun’s sphere of influence. In doing so this visitor, an American craft called New Horizons, will fulfil an aspiration that began a mere 60 years ago, to turn the planets from being little more than night lights, whose surface features were visible fuzzily, if at all, in telescopes, into palpable worlds of known geography.
The picky may object that Pluto is not a planet. Technically, they are right. It was regarded as one when New Horizons took off, in January 2006, but was downgraded to the status of “dwarf planet” seven months later by a meeting of astronomers who decided, ironically, that the knowledge which earlier spacecraft had brought allowed them to refine their classifications of what did and did not constitute “planetness”. Pluto, to the dismay of many, fell on the wrong side of the cut.
Planet or not, Pluto completes a collection that began with the...
from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1Hl50BD
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