Far away, a beloved dot
Arcs through cold and shrouded spaces,
Not lonely, as we had once thought,
But circled by more rocky faces:
Charon, Nix, and Hydra found,
Classified as “dwarf” or pseudo,
And though such bodies now abound,
None sparks wonder quite like Pluto.
On the hunt for Planet X,
Tombaugh found a ball of light,
Among a crowd of tiny specks;
Imaginations soon took flight.
Elusive is this outerworld;
Nine years ago we took a dare –
To deepest space, a scouter hurled
… and soon it will be there!
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Further reading:
Pluto-bound probe faces its toughest challenge: finding Pluto, Witze (2015) Nature
NASA Mission: New Horizons to Pluto
This is one in a series of posts by Katherine Allen, a researcher in geochemistry and paleoclimate at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University.
