Pluto Explored

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft sets off to explore distant Pluto, the tiny world that challenges everything we know about the solar system

By Fred Guterl

DISCOVER Vol. 27 No. 03 | March 2006 | Astronomy & Physics

The solar system was a cramped, provincial place in May 1989, and so was the Italian restaurant in downtown Baltimore where Alan Stern exhorted a dozen of his colleagues to join him on an improbable mission: Persuade NASA to send a probe to Pluto. At the time, even most astronomers weren't interested in this weird, tiny orb on the fringe of the solar system. "I was skeptical," says Fran Bagenal, then a graduate student at MIT, who was present at the meal. "Sending a mission to Pluto seemed pretty uninteresting at the time."

http://www.discover.com/issues/mar-06/features/pluto-explored/