NASA Chief Jared Isaacman: "To make Pluto a planet again"
Pluto was discovered less than 100 years ago, and for 20 years, it was no longer considered a planet. NASA chief wants to change that.
A photo of Pluto from New Horizons
(Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Alex Parker)
Just under 20 years after Pluto was stripped of its planet status, NASA, led by its new chief, is reportedly pushing to reverse that decision. Jared Isaacman stated this at the very end of a US Senate hearing. This would also mean that the only American who discovered a planet in the solar system would "get the credit he received once and rightfully deserves to receive again,” according to Isaacman. Within the US space agency, work is underway on publications that they want to share with the scientific community “to revisit this discussion.” Personally, he clearly belongs to those who want to make Pluto a planet again.
Volatile History
The surprising and brief statement was made on Tuesday during a US Senate hearing that was actually about NASA's budget. Senator Jerry Moran (Republican) from Kansas asked Isaacman about NASA's interest in Pluto, noting that Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto, hailed from his home state. The NASA chief assured him that he also wanted to bring up the topic. However, Isaacman's brief statement did not reveal what exactly NASA plans to do now or how serious they are about this request. The last major debate about Pluto's status was about ten years ago.
Clyde Tombaugh, originally from Illinois but who moved to Kansas as a youth, discovered Pluto on February 18, 1930, at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. By comparing hundreds of photographic plates, Tombaugh found Pluto in images taken on January 23 and 29, 1930, among numerous fixed stars. This confirmed what the observatory's founder had predicted 25 years earlier based on the orbital data of Neptune and Uranus. Tombaugh had only been working at the observatory for a few weeks at the time of the discovery, which had stalled for years due to a legal dispute. The ninth planet was presented to the public on March 13 – exactly 149 years to the day after William Herschel discovered Uranus.
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76 years later, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) adopted a new definition for planets, which resulted in Pluto being classified only as a dwarf planet since then. However, many of those who voted against the decision never accepted it. They gained momentum when New Horizons sent spectacular images of its flyby of the celestial body back to Earth in 2015. The NASA probe had been launched in early 2006, a few months before Pluto lost its planet status. Its observations revealed an unexpectedly complex Pluto to humanity, leading to renewed calls for the demotion to be reversed. However, a significant movement for this never materialized.
(mho)
