“The mission has transformed a distant icy dot—hardly resolved from Earth-based telescopes, and a smeared ball even from the daring Hubble Space Telescope—into a true world, covered with remarkably complex geology, including a mysterious belt of dark disks around its equator,” writes Professor Marcelo Gleiser in a blog post on NPR’s 13.7 Cosmos & Culture about the New Horizons spacecraft’s flyby of Pluto.
“Even discounting our tendency for endearing images that have anthropomorphic meanings, it is a once in a lifetime event, capping an era of NASA-led space exploration that has taken probes to all of the major worlds of our solar system,” says Gleiser, the Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy and a professor of physics and astronomy.
Read the full opinion piece, published 7/15/15 by NPR.