Pluto Essay

There has recently been a NASA spacecraft, called New Horizons, that flew to Pluto to do some studying. The spacecraft took off 9 ½ years ago from Cape Canaveral, Florida and its flight has spanned 3 billion miles. The spacecraft is operated from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. New Horizons has taken pictures of Pluto and has revealed a variety of landscapes. From soaring mountains to dunes to frozen ice. “Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms,” said Alan Stern, principal investigator with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Stern is playing an important role in analysing data sent by the probe. Stern also said that,“If an artist had painted this Pluto before our flyby, …show more content…
The Vulcan Planum is a series of smooth planes with faint ridges and grooves. The southern region contains less craters than the northern region which scientists say indicates a wide scale of resurfacing. Some of the more recent pictures by New Horizons indicates a startling array of colors all over Pluto. Pictures continue to be sent in to NASA daily by New Horizons. A new scientific concept that I learned about is the Vulcan Planum. The Vulcan Planum is on Pluto. The Vulcan Planum includes smooth planes with faint ridges and grooves. The southern region of the Vulcan Planum has less craters than the northern which scientists say indicates a wide scale of resurfacing. The Vulcan Planum is an interesting landscape found on Charon. Charon is Pluto’s largest moon. These articles relate to Foundations of Science because part of science includes the study of the universe. If you are going to study the universe then you have to study Pluto and its moons. The two articles are valid because they cite credible sources. They cite people like Alan Stern who played a part in the spacecraft, New Horizons. The first article, Tween Tribune, is definitely reliable because on the it has to do with