Let's Get Pluto Out of the Dog House

Poor Pluto. Poor misunderstood, maligned, underrated, way-out-there Pluto. Poor eccentric little rubber ball. Is it a planet? A comet? An asteroid? Fifty-seven years old and no one—not even its closest friends and admirers—knows if it’s a grown-up.The debate over Pluto’s status rages on, largely in the popular press. For example, within a 2-month period, The New York Times reported that Pluto is such a runt that it may be getting kicked out of the planetary litter (March 30, p. B-6) and then that it’s got such a nice little atmosphere that it might really be a planet after all (May 14, p. A-23). Is it any wonder Pluto’s a bit schizophrenic? It can’t even decide whether or not to be the farthest planet from the Sun (until 1999 Neptune has that honor; then Pluto takes over).Pluto is so devalued that a little rodent like Mickey Mouse gets to name his harebrained dog after it. Some fate for the planet named for the king of the underworld. Pluto is the Rodney Dangerfield of the solar system. Talk about no respect.It didn’t start out that way. Pluto was welcomed warmly into the planetary family in March 1930. as the answer to a major astronomical question. Something out there seemed to be pulling Uranus and Neptune around and when Clyde Tombaugh found Pluto, the problem seemed to be solved. Pluto was thought by some to be the fabled Planet X. Generations of school children learned Pluto was the ninth stone from the Sun—so small and distant it could hardly be seen with the best telescopes. But there it was—a barely perceptible scientific fact whirling slowly on the farthest reaches of our understanding.Smallest of planets, made of frozen water, methane and ammonia—lifeless, forbidding. No red sands or spectacular rings, no mysterious clouds or myriad moons, the orphan of the solar system. Asimov, Bradbury Heinlein and the rest took us to meet elongated Venusians and quarrelaome Martians. They described terraformed space colonies and galactic empires light years from Earth. But they skipped right over the dead planet called Pluto.Then came the revisionists, questioning whether Pluto really deserves to be a planet at all. Too small, and its moon is too large, they said. Not much atmosphere, they noted with a frown. Maybe a comet or an asteroid, they concluded. Now data from the Infrared Astronomical Satellite and Earth-bound telescopes tell us the planet is warmer than we thought, meaning it’s atmosphere probably is more than just a little haze of methane gas.Brian Marsden, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, wrote the Times (May 6, 1987, p. A-34) to say “it makes little sense to change [Pluto’s] status for the sake of convenience. The important thing is to encourage observations that may help us understand more about it.”He’s right. It’s time to rehabilitate Pluto. With all the weeping and gnashing of teeth about the sorry state of the U.S. space program, no one has looked to Pluto for the answer. What NASA needs now isn’t a manned trip to Mars or a space station: it needs an unmanned trip to the ninth planet. Right now there’s nothing scheduled to go within a couple hundred million miles of the place. We need to get to know Pluto better, settle all doubts about exactly what it is.Then we’ll mount a manned mission. We’ll do lunch. Send up Carl Sagan with a mini-cam and book time on public television for, oh, say 2187. Prime time. The Pluto Hour. Respect at last. It’s time to get Pluto out of the dog house.Byrne is on the staff of THE SCIENTIST.

Let's Get Pluto Out of the Dog House

Poor Pluto. Poor misunderstood, maligned, underrated, way-out-there Pluto.

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