Pluto - Basic Properties, The Discovery Of Pluto, Pluto's Characteristics, Charon, Pluto's Strange Orbit - Charon's characteristics
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The ninth planet from the Sun, Pluto is one of the least well understood objects in the solar system. It is the smallest of the major planets, and has a most unusual orbit. Pluto's companion moon, Charon, is so large that the pair essentially form a binary system. How the Pluto-Charon system formed and how the system acquired its special 2-to-3 orbital resonance with Neptune are unanswered questions at the present time. We will probably not know more until a planned NASA space mission visits the Pluto-Charon system. At this time, Pluto is the only planet in the solar system that has not been visited by a space probe.
In 2000 NASA canceled the previously planed Pluto Express mission. In order to make progress toward its goal of reaching Pluto with a probe by 2020, NASA scientists and engineers have created the New Horizons mission to be administered by Johns Hopkins University, Applied Physics Laboratory.
The Pluto-Kuiper Belt Mission will be the first reconnaissance of Pluto and Charon. The probe will go on to explore the Kuiper Belt. As of February 2003, the Pluto-Kuiper Belt mission was scheduled to launch in 2006, and to encounter Pluto and Charon as early as 2015. Observations of Kuiper Belt objects might occur approximately 11 years later.
Charon's surface is thought to be composed of water ice, nitrogen ice, and carbon-monoxide ice. Charon probably has a core composed of silicate rock, which is a minor component of the satellite's mass. About the core, is a hypothetical mantle and cryosphere (ice layer) of water ice, nitrogen ice, and carbon-monoxide ice. It is likely that Charon has no internal heat source and that it has no appreciable magnetic field.
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Pluto has the most eccentric (non-circular) orbit of all the planets in our solar system. While the planet's mean distance from the Sun is 39.44 Astronomical Units (AU), it can be as far as 49.19 AU from the Sun and as close as 29.58 AU. The time required for Pluto to complete one orbit about the Sun (its sidereal period) is 248.03 years, and the time for the planet to repeat alignments wit…
Speculations about the existence of a ninth planet arose soon after astronomers discovered that the planet Neptune (discovered in 1846) did not move in its orbit as predicted. The small differences between Neptune's predicted and actual position were taken as evidence that an unseen object was introducing slight gravitational perturbations in the planet's orbit. The first search for …
Charon, Pluto's companion moon, was discovered by James Christy in June, 1978. Working at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, Christy noted that what appeared to be "bumps" on several photographic images taken of Pluto reappeared on a periodic basis. With this information, Christy realized that what had previously been dismissed as image distortions were really c…
The Pluto-Charon system has the strangest orbit of all the planets in the solar system. It has a large eccentricity and a high orbital inclination of 17.1° to the ecliptic. These extreme orbital characteristics suggest that since its formation the Pluto-Charon system may have undergone some considerable orbital evolution. Shortly after Pluto was first discovered, astronomers realized that u…
Obviously, a history of the Pluto-Charon system is quite speculative. It is though perhaps that this double-planet system may have originated in a more nearly circular orbit and that a subsequent catastrophic impact changed the orbit to highly elliptical and perhaps separated the two masses (Charon being formed by coalesced debris in near Pluto space). This may also account for the strongly inclin…
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