We know that Pluto has a moon system, and we suspect that the system was formed by a single cataclysmic event in that planet’s deep past.
Before the week is over, those suspicions will either be confirmed … or dashed.
The NASA probe New Horizons is making its closest approach to this mystery world at the edge of the solar system tomorrow and it is going to answer books full of questions.
NASA’s Alan Stern says this fly-by is historic on two counts. It is the first time in human history that we’ll get a close look at Pluto and its moons and it comes 50 years to the day from the first ever successful flyby of another world.
On July 14, 1965, Mariner 4 sent us our first close look at Mars.
We expect to gather five thousand times as much data from this encounter as we did from that one.