Come February 18, and it will be 94 years since we’ve known of the existence of Pluto. Pluto has enjoyed popularity with the public throughout its known existence. Right from the time it was discovered in 1930 and hailed as the ninth planet, through to 2006 when it was demoted to the status of a dwarf planet, and since, Pluto has held the imagination of the masses.
Pluto takes nearly 248 years to orbit around the sun and its elongated orbit ensures that it is about 7.3 billion kilometres from the sun at its farthest and gets closest when it is about 4.4 billion kilometres from it! With its closest distance to the sun in itself being very very far, this Kuiper belt object is naturally very distant from Earth as well.
So far, in fact, that trying to see and resolve the surface of Pluto from Earth is akin to trying to see the print on a ball when the ball is placed over 50 km away! Pluto’s disk is so small that it can’t be resolved from beneath the Earth’s atmosphere. We are not just talking about plain viewing, but also using the most powerful ground-based telescopes.
