These two recent discoveries show that the Pluto system is more crowded than scientists had thought.
MSN: New Pluto moon hints at perilous journey for spacecraft
With so much pioneering science that such a probe could do researchers know they can still make a case for the Pluto probe.
Stern and his colleagues are inventorying the Pluto system with Hubble to get a better handle on the risks New Horizons faces, and to help design the safest possible trajectory for the spacecraft.
MSN: New Pluto moon hints at perilous journey for spacecraft
Mr. STERN: So a few weeks after the Pluto encounter when we've chosen our target, we'll fire the engines of the spacecraft, but we'll have to fly a distance something like from here to the sun or twice that far to reach these Kuiper Belt objects.
Alan Stern expects that after the Pluto flyby in 2015 or so, there will be plenty of power left, both electricity from the plutonium generator and fuel, so New Horizons will keep on going to explore other Plutolike objects in this region of the solar system which is known as the Kuiper Belt.
Here, just so you can compare, are photos that the Hubble Space Telescope took of the planet Pluto, the outermost planet.
This periodic reappearance of fresh frost takes place every Pluto-year (248 Earth-years) and is the reason that Pluto is one of the most reflective surfaces in the Solar System.
Astronomers today gave Pluto the heave ho, voting in an official definition for the word planet that leaves Pluto out.
But the forces exerted by objects in the Kuiper belt (a collection of small bodies orbiting the sun beyond the orbit of Pluto), or by the galaxy as a whole, were also far too weak to be responsible.
By tradition, the moons of Pluto have names associated with Hades and the underworld.
ENGADGET: Pluto moon names to be selected by public voting, we talk to astronomer Mark Showalter
The discoverers of Pluto's two tiniest moons are inviting the public to help select names for the new moons.
ENGADGET: Pluto moon names to be selected by public voting, we talk to astronomer Mark Showalter
And rather than making it harder to garner support for a Pluto mission, as some researchers fear, the questioning of Pluto's status seems, if anything, to have advanced their cause.
And since the number of objects in the catalogue is fast approaching 10, 000, he advocates making Pluto the first five-figure minor planet.
But part of the problem with the definition - I mean, as an example - is that if you look at Mars - if Mars - if we discovered a Mars-sized object out beyond the orbit of Pluto, it couldn't be a planet, because over the age of the solar system it wouldn't have time to clear its orbit.
But those panels have been sold only in Europe and Australia (where the concept of Pluto was first developed at a university there).
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However, she served as a unit publicist for the 2002 Eddie Murphy movie "The Adventures of Pluto Nash, " in which Baldwin had a cameo role.
Horn stepped up the partnership, bringing Village in on projects like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory but also asking it to shoulder films such as The Adventures of Pluto Nash.
Let's put it this way: The odds are greater that there's life on Pluto than that the GOP has a brokered convention.
But most of the history of the solar system--this is why the comet is so important--most of the history of this comet was spent out beyond Neptune, out where Pluto is at the very edge of the solar system, what we call the Kuiper belt.
The resolution does make Pluto one of a number of dwarf planets, which confusingly are not officially planets.
If all goes well, NASA will launch the first spacecraft to Pluto today.
Pluto is the last of the nine familiar planets to be visited by a spacecraft and the program made a major discovery even before leaving the ground.
The SETI Institute, a private non-profit, best known for its ties to the eponymous search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the universe, is looking to add a little bit of audience participation to the act of naming Pluto's newly discovered moons, which sport those rather uninspired alphanumeric designations.
And water would be all the more exciting on Ganymede because it is the largest moon in the solar system (larger even than the planets Mercury and Pluto) and, like earth, it has a permanent magnetic field that protects part of its surface from bombardment by certain sorts of life-destroying radiation.
The discovery of another moon around Pluto is exciting news for planetary science, but it's also likely causing some anxiety for the team in charge of New Horizons, a spacecraft set to be the first probe ever to visit the dwarf planet.
MSN: New Pluto moon hints at perilous journey for spacecraft
But first, we haven't heard the last about the ignominious vote last month to strip Pluto of its place in our solar system - kicked out of the planetary lineup by a group of astronomers because it doesn't fit the new definition of what a planet is.
The "new" Solar System agreed at the IAU's General Assembly has eight planets - Mercury to Neptune - and at least three dwarf planets: Pluto, Eris and the largest asteroid in the Solar System, Ceres.
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As Pluto recedes from the Sun, much of its thin nitrogen atmosphere will condense as frost on the surface.
The probe is traveling so fast that a particle the size of a BB could destroy it, so researchers are worried about the broad debris field that Pluto's moons may have spawned.
MSN: New Pluto moon hints at perilous journey for spacecraft
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