Word: pluto
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...true edge of the solar system is a zone far beyond Pluto where charged particles from the sun meet the cold gas between the stars. NASA scientists believe they have finally found it, by means of the twin Voyager space probes; it is between 8.4 billion and 11.2 billion miles from the sun, or at least three times as far away from Earth as Neptune, currently the most distant planet...
That was before NASA came under severe pressure to cut costs dramatically and justify its decisions on what missions to fly. Budget constraints have already led to the cancellation of some projects and to the development of a bargain-basement mini-spacecraft that could scout out Pluto for a fraction of the cost of a typical planetary flight...
...belt ever observed. The body, known for now as 1992 QB1, is about 200 km (120 miles) across, and a preliminary calculation puts it at more than 5.1 billion km (3.2 billion miles) away. That doesn't necessarily make it the most remote object in the solar system, since Pluto retreats to more than 7 billion km from the sun. But it does imply that the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud really exist and that the solar system's boundary may lie 10,000 times as far away as Pluto ever ventures...
...Earth and Mars. Much of the gas and light dust , farther out was gathered up into the so-called gas giants: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The rest was blown by solar heat and wind to the outskirts, where it presumably congealed into chunks of ice and dust. (Rocky Pluto is an anomaly, and many astronomers believe it isn't a planet at all but a giant comet or asteroid flung into its present position when it had a close gravitational encounter with one of the outer planets...
SCIENCE: Beyond Pluto...