9th Rock from the Sun

In the short time it took us to go from President Kennedy to President Obama, our space program has managed to travel from one end of our solar system to the other. It's nothing short of amazing when you think about how quickly we went from having no space program at all to having such an informative database built from our actual travels. We have now officially traveled to and photographed every single one of the nine planets we were taught as kids. There really is no limit to what the human mind can achieve, is there?!

For those of you who haven't been following our mission to Pluto, the last of those nine planets to remain photo-less, let me get you all caught up. The United States spent $700 million to create a spacecraft, eventually naming it "New Horizons" and launching it directly into an Earth-and-solar-escape trajectory with an Earth-relative speed of about 16.26 kilometers per second (58,536 km/h; 36,373 mph).

In layman's terms, this means that they launched New Horizons at such a fast speed that it's actually leaving the solar system entirely. There are no engines powerful enough to slow it down at that speed, not even an ion drive, which is the most efficient engine we've got. So basically, whatever photos we do get are going to have to suffice because we only have one shot at this thing, and then.... voila! "Then why'd they launch this thing so fast," you ask? It was the trade-off they had to make in order to do the mission at all because they had to get there very, very quickly to be able to study it before the atmosphere freezes out, as Pluto is moving further away from the sun. Maybe someday we'll be able to send an orbiter to Pluto, but if this is so, we probably won't live to see it, especially since it'd be wiser and easier to put orbiters around the other gas giants first since they have so much more gravity that you can let them do much of the work for you.

But anyway, so we launched this thing, and now — more than nine years and three-billion-plus miles (4.5 light hours) later — New Horizons finally got to Pluto and sent us back our first-ever pictures of the dwarf planet and its five moons, a.k.a. Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra.

Just minutes before the long-awaited fly-by took place at 7:49 a.m. ET on July 14th, NASA released the final full-frame color image of Pluto by publishing it on Instagram. The photo was taken at about 4 p.m. ET on July 13th, according to NASA, from 476,000 miles away. In the image, we can see the "heart" of Pluto in great detail, craters that we never even knew were there and the planet's dark equatorial belt.

This new image allowed us to finally know for sure the size of the mysterious ninth rock from the sun: 1,473 miles (2,370 kilometers), which is smaller even than North America. (Look at the photo below, which compares the size of Pluto and its largest moon Charon to the size of our Earth.)

The images that have been released since have shown us a few other interesting tidbits, as well. For instance, from 47,800 miles away, New Horizons took this next photo, showing us that Pluto has ice mountains up to 11,000 feet high — comparable to the height of the Rockies — which cast shadows across a relatively smooth plain. The lack of craters indicates that the surface is quite young, no more than 100 million years old.

As for Pluto's largest moon, Charon, the next photo — taken from a distance of 289,000 miles — reveals that it has a dark patch, informally called Mordor, at its north pole. Experts believe that this reveals a canyon about four to six miles deep.

There was also this low-resolution image taken of Hydra, a potato-shaped moon that ranks among Pluto's smallest, which was essentially just snapped to try and figure out the size of the thing. Each large pixel in this image is two miles across, which makes this moon roughly 27 miles wide and 20 miles tall. However, since the photo came out so reflective, we likely got an added bit of information, since this might mean it's composed of water ice.

Pluto has fascinated astronomers since 1930, when it was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh using the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. Some of Tombaugh's ashes are aboard New Horizons, which is the first-ever space mission to explore a world so far away from Earth.

The spacecraft's fly-by of Pluto and its five known moons provides valuable insight into the solar system's "Kuiper Belt," which contains icy objects that range in size from boulders to dwarf planets. Kuiper Belt objects, such as Pluto, can preserve evidence about the early formation of the solar system.

Anyway, this is essentially just a preview of the photos to come. A few more photographs will be released throughout the week, and a much larger set will be released starting in September.

PS: As for all the creepy informal names they've given the different features on the planet, well, that's a whole 'nother conversation for a whole 'nother time.