Word: planetsized
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No wonder. The solar system most of us studied in school was a deceptively simple place. There were the sun, a few asteroids and comets and, as of 1930, when Clyde Tombaugh spotted Pluto on a telescopic photograph, nine planets. Memorizing those nine names has long been a childhood rite...
Tyson's heretical planetarium exhibit was based on the theory that there must be lots of things out there the size of Pluto. Brown and Trujillo found some of them, and for the past year and a half, the pressure has been on to decide once and for all which...
In the four decades it has been affiliated with NASA, the lab has dispatched probes to seven of the planets and dozens of their moons and has tossed in the sun, our own moon and a comet for good measure. "We do interplanetary," says Pete Theisinger, a deputy director of...
Of course, just passing on rules is not all there is to keeping things running. You have to enforce them too. Space deadlines are uncompromising things: miss a launch window when you're trying to send a probe to Mars, and you will have to wait two years until the...
There is one final--much larger--constituency that must stand by the lab: the public. Like any going enterprise, J.P.L. must sell its product, and one way it does that is with pictures. Out in the regions where J.P.L.'s ships fly, the sun is reduced to little more than...