Pluto is bigger than scientists thought – Terra.com

The small celestial body known as Pluto is a bit higher than previously thought.

Just before a reconnaissance flight NASA pass by Pluto, scientists announced Monday the spacecraft New Horizons (Nuevos Horizontes) has estimated the size of dwarf body cream.

The measurements made by the spacecraft will happen on Tuesday near Pluto indicate that its diameter is 2,370 kilometers (1473 miles), with a margin of error of plus or minus 18 kilometers (12 miles). That figure 80 kilometers (50 miles) above previous estimates.

The main scientist Alan Stern, said this means that Pluto has less density of thought, which could mean that its interior is colder and less rocky.

The cruise ship, which has traveled 4,800 million kilometers (3,000 million miles) in nine and a half from Cape Canaveral, Florida, ending Tuesday morning when the ship approaches 12,499 kilometers (7767 miles) of Pluto at 49,900 kph (31,000 mph).

Mission managers said there was only one chance in 10,000 that something will go wrong at this stage of the journey, as a possible impact of a celestial body other. But Stern said: “We are flying into the unknown This is the risk we take with all sorts of exploration.”.

“It sounds like science fiction, but it is not,” Stern said at the start of a news conference at the headquarters of the mission in Maryland. “Tomorrow morning spacecraft US fly by Pluto system and make history.”

Discovered in 1930, Pluto is the last planet in our solar system to be explored. It was considered a full planet when New Horizons took off in 2006, only to become a dwarf planet later that year.

New Horizons has conveyed the best images of Pluto and Charon moon at the far edge of the solar system.

“The Pluto system is captivating in its uniqueness, its strange beauty,” Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado said.

With the game finally in hand, everything seems surreal to the New Horizons team gathered at the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University. The energy of the place on Monday was described as electric.

Glen Fountain, project manager, said New Horizons, after all, is like a freight train moving at high speed down the road, “and this light is coming at you, and you he knows he will not stop, you can not slow down. ”

“Of course, the light is Pluto, and we’re all excited,” Fountain said.