Word: pluto
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...into orbit and begin a two-year program of photographing and mapping the terrain below. Over the next eight years, up to eight more ships will follow. As these new probes are heading Marsward, others will be dispatched to places as familiar as the moon and as remote as Pluto. "In the next 10 years," says NASA administrator Daniel Goldin, "we'll be flying by, orbiting, landing, roving and bringing back samples from every critical planetary body in the solar system." In the wake of Friday's landing, it's hard not to believe...
While Europa may be the solar system's most promising Petri dish, it is by no means the only one. Saturn's Titan, larger than both Mercury and Pluto, has an atmosphere fully 60% denser than Earth's, forming a sort of photochemical haze that appears to be full of the stuff of prebiology. The problem is that Titan is cold. With temperatures hovering near -290[degrees]F and no signs yet of significant heat to drive chemical reactions, the moon could be awash in organics that are nevertheless unable to combine in biologically useful ways...
Note: Avoid the ToonTown area unless you're with someone who's under 50 inches. But when you wonder how two mice (Mickey and Minnie) could own one dog (Pluto) while being best friends with another (Goofy), you'll probably want to steer clear anyways...
Wallace has the nuts-and-bolts romanticism of a crackpot inventor; Gromit, a bookish sort, gets his friend out of wild scrapes when not reading Crime and Punishment (by Fido Dogstoyevsky) or Pluto's Republic or Electronics for Dogs. The typical plot: Wallace will be seized by some selfish idea--flying to the moon for a cheese snack in A Grand Day Out or renting out Gromit's room to a pistol-packin' penguin in The Wrong Trousers or courting a sheep-napping femme fatale in A Close Shave--and Gromit will pitch us a conspiratorial sigh with a mute...
...return visitor makes it ideal for amateur stargazers but a bit less enticing to scientists. Comets are believed to be leftover material from the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago. Millions are still orbiting lazily in a halo called the Oort cloud, far beyond Pluto, where they are perfectly preserved. It's only occasionally that one changes orbit and plunges into the relative warmth of Earth's neighborhood. And the more often a comet returns to be heated, the more its structure and chemical composition are altered...