Word: pluto
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...that will add enormously to our knowledge. But it won't help scientists decide whether Pluto should keep its status as a planet, a debate that only intensified when 2003 UB313 was discovered; if Pluto is a planet, then its bigger cousin must be as well. The International Astronomical Union promises a decision, but Stern doesn't know when it will come. For now, he's not thinking much about that. He has a spacecraft to launch. [The following text appears as part of a complex diagram...
...MISSION Using Jupiter's gravity to speed it on its way, New Horizons will be the first probe to take close-up images of Pluto and analyze its atmosphere, thus enabling astronomers to understand how the icy bodies of the Kuiper Belt came...
...EARTH LAUNCH - Between Jan. 17 and Feb. 14 ? SATURN ? JUPITER Jupiter gravity assist - February to March 2007 ? URANUS ? NEPTUNE ? PLUTO PLUTO-CHARON ENCOUNTER July 2015. During flyby, the probe will pass within a mere 6,000 miles (10,000 km) of Pluto?40 times as close as the Earth is to our own moon ? KUIPER BELT Voyage into Kuiper Belt 2016-2020 What is the Kuiper Belt? Named for Gerard Kuiper, who predicted its existence in the 1950s, it is a vast, disk-shaped cloud of thousands of icy bodies that starts near Neptune...
...ORBIT OF PLUTO ? From Pluto, the sun appears about 1,000 times as dim as it does from Earth ? Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, are locked in synchronous orbit, always keeping the same face toward each other...
...Antenna ? Heat shield ? Thruster ? Star tracking cameras ? PEPSSI - Detects molecules escaping from Pluto's atmosphere ? SWAP - Looks for magnetic fields and measures how fast the atmosphere is escaping ? RTG - Powers the craft with a tiny amount of plutonium. Because the probe will travel so far from the sun, solar power was not an option ? LORRI - A high-resolution telescope and camera capable of detecting features about the size of a football field ? REX - Uses radio waves to analyze the atmosphere and determine night-side temperature ? ALICE - Analyzes ultraviolet light to determine...