NASA Visited Pluto For The First Time Ever

July 15, 2015

pluto

Inventing new smartphones and hybrid cars is always exciting, but space discoveries are what fire us up the most. In that name, we’re proud to inform our readers that NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has visited the most distant object in our solar system and it was – magnificent.

First Date After A Century Of Waiting

Most people know as the ninth planet of our solar system. It’s six times lighter and almost two times smaller than our own Moon, but it can get as cold as -400F. Just one year on this tiny rock lasts over 90,000 Earth days.

That’s all fine and dandy, but there’s still the problem of Pluto’s official title. It was discovered almost 80 years ago and it was immediately labeled as a planet. However, in 2006 Pluto was stripped of its status due to its similarity to many objects in the Kuiper asteroid belt.

While Pluto’s planetary status is debatably, nobody can deny the importance of NASA’s latest mission. As Carolyn Porco, who worked on both the Voyager and Cassini missions, said: “It’s important to have an opportunity like the Pluto flyby to remind ourselves that we are actually quite capable of doing extraordinary and beautiful things.”

“We are the beings that developed the languages and mathematics and science, and we are the beings that established a program – a systematic methodical program – of exploring our cosmic neighborhood and that’s mind-blowing. It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing.”

Now, we finally got a chance to get up close and personal with this dwarf planet thanks to the New Horizons spacecraft. It only cost about $700 million, but after seeing the amazing shots and collecting the data, we got to say “It was worth it!”