June 2017
Bepi-Colombo will unveil Mercury’s secrets
... a lot of fuel needs to be carried for the manoeuvres – in fact going to Mercury requires more fuel than going to Pluto! Even if engineers were able to stabilise a Mercury-orbiting spacecraft, you then have to deal with the intolerable...
17 May 2019
First science results released on Ultima Thule
...dwarf planet informally called Cthulhu. It has been proposed that Pluto is in fact one giant comet, made up of roughly...be made of the same stuff, perhaps that could help shed light on Pluto’s formation. However there is a long way to go yet before all...
03 October 2018
Newly discovered far-flung object supports Planet X existence
... length so that it never gets too close to the massive planet. This behaviour is already seen with Pluto and Neptune, as Pluto never strays too close to the ice giant even though their orbits cross. "What makes...
March 2015
Dawn of ion propulsion
... ice is the first dwarf planet discovered (this happened 129 years before Pluto) and the largest body between the sun and Pluto that a spacecraft has not yet visited. Dawn will take up residence there...
February 2016
Nuclear Flashlamps in Space
...) extends from around the orbit of the planet Neptune out to perhaps a couple times the orbital distance of Pluto. Pluto itself is the first known resident of the EKB but there are over a thousand Edgeworth- Kuiper Belt...
January 2020
Small body missions unveil interplanetary secrets
... Horizons is another exciting mission that flew by the dwarf planet Pluto in 2015 and has more recently encountered Ultima Thule, a primitive... the building blocks of the larger bodies such as Pluto and these observations solve the problem we had in ...
