The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet by Neil deGrasse Tyson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I am a 100% Pluto “demotion” supporter. The reclassification of Pluto was based on a new understanding of how the solar system real estate is divided up; it has little to do with the size of Pluto or the fact that it hasn’t “dominated the mass in its orbit.”

I get why children and former children want to cling to Pluto is a planet. It was the smallest planet and kids could relate to it. Likewise, a lot of people don’t have a clear understanding of how science is always improving its facts and refining its terms to better fit reality; so it’s threatening to them that science textbooks have to be rewritten. But that’s nothing new; science textbooks are always being rewritten. Most of the time nobody has anything at stake and they don’t notice.

It’s a big, complicated solar system, and the so-called “planets” are just one chapter in its story. To me, that’s cool.

View all my reviews

Space is hard. Sometimes, the Old School folks–NASA, JPL–make it look so easy we forget that. We all “Ooohed” and “Aaahed” at the mammoth achievement that was the Juno craft’s close shave of Jupiter on July 4th, which put it in position for its regular orbits.

Then we cringed last week when new kid on the block, SpaceX, had the second disaster in their hit-and-miss history.

So I was pretty nervous this week when OSIRIS-REx, NASA’s long-awaited asteroid sample-return mission vehicle, sat on a launch pad rocket. I saw a comment on Twitter asking if there was a way to salvage the probe if something were to go catastrophically wrong with the rocket as it had with SpaceX.

…Um, no?

Rockets launch things out of Earth’s gravity because they are big, huge, carefully controlled bombs. “Carefully controlled” most of the time.

This time, though, it was a picture-perfect launch:

http://www.popsci.com/nasa-asteroid-mission-osiris-rex-launch

After launch, the rocket hurtled the craft into Earth orbit on a trajectory that will take it towards the asteroid Bennu, where it will orbit for a year, studying the space rock, before landing, collecting samples, and bringing those samples back to Earth.

An unmanned spacecraft that actually comes back to us is kind of a big deal. Usually, once they leave Earth orbit, they’re gone forever; it’s too expensive to give them enough fuel to bring them home. But if we ever hope to understand asteroids, we need to study the materials they are made of. And short of going to one ourselves, or bringing one to us, this is the cheapest alternative… for now.

After three days in the desert fun
I was looking at a river bed
And the story it told of a river that flowed
Made me sad to think it was dead

America, Horse With No Name
Photo credit: NASA