Why is the Pluto New Horizons probe Flying past pluto and not attempting to orbit?
399520
In order to get out to Pluto in the time frame it is going to do it in (10 years?), the New Horizons probe needs to be traveling very fast....Pluto is a LONG way out there.\nPluto is also a pretty small planet, and thus doesnt have tha strong of a gravitational pull.\n\nSo you have the combination of a very fast moving probe going by a small planet.  I would be pretty hard to get tha thing into an orbit....it would take alot of energy to due to (slow it down, put it into an orbit trajectory).\nThat energy needs to be supplies somehow, by means of some fuel.  That fuel has mass which you need to carry all the way out to Pluto to use, all that extra mass costs more fuel in order to lauch and accelerate out to Pluto.\n\nIt is probably a money problem, it would probably be too expensive and complicated I am guessing, but it could be done.\nAlso, NASA really likes sending thins outside of our solar system as we dont really know much about what it is out there on the edge.  If your going to go all the way to Pluto, why not go farther?
892940
talk about pluto. Even though that was a couple of months ago it is still current.
979991
A simple answer and that is because of the gravitational force.\nIt also has no orbit.
1082872
The sky's the limit!  Sorry, couldn't resist.\n\nIt really depends on what advances are made in physics and technology.  Right now it looks like it would be very unlikely that man will ever leave the solar system.  The reason for that is because it takes so much energy to push a craft at the speeds necessary to get anywhere in a decent amount of time.  NASA recently launched a tiny, little probe to Pluto, which will take 10 years to arrive.  To send a crew of people that far, a much larger craft would be needed to support the life systems, which means far more energy would be required to push it.  The energy source would further increase the mass of the craft and increase the energy requirements, etc.\n\nI think our best bet with "conventional" technology would be to send a suicide mission to Alpha Centauri (the next-nearest star).  I don't know what the point would be of sending humans there, but it could be done over a period of maybe 100 years.  The original astronauts might not make it, but they could have children or grandchildren during the voyage who could reach the star.\n\nIf scientists ever figure out how to create and travel through wormholes or other theoretical means, then there's really no limit to how far we can go.
231742
Non have as of this date, NASA either did launch a probe or is about too that will visit Pluto because it is the closest to the Earth that it will be for another 300 years.\n\nfound this link after I answered.
664542
All orbits are elliptical (note that circles are subsets of ellipses.)  Exactly how Pluto go to be where it is (and where also includes its coordinates in a velocity space, in addition to xyz space) is not known.  One interesting thing about it is that it is in a resonance with Neptunes orbit, so that whenever it is close to Neptunes orbit, Neptune is on the other side of the sun. Neptune's mass can't perturb Pluto.  In other words, Pluto is in a special orbit that is stable. \n\nI doubt it had its origin as a moon of Neptune, or else it likely would have been flung into a very radical orbit by an encouter with that planet. More likely it is one of MANY objects that found itself orbiting in similar orbits; all the others have long ago been removed from the picture by Neptune encounters.
483988
A new object, 2003 UB303, was discovered in orbit beyond Pluto. It's preliminary name is Lila. There is still debate as to whether or not it is actually a planet or a large asteroid. This is the same as the current debate about Pluto.
136781
Pluto (planet), ninth planet from the Sun and outermost known member of the solar system. Pluto was discovered as the result of a telescopic search inaugurated in 1905 by the American astronomer Percival Lowell, who conjectured the existence of a distant planet beyond Neptune as the cause of slight perturbations (see Orbit) in the motions of Uranus. Continued by members of the Lowell Observatory staff, the search ended successfully in 1930, when the American astronomer Clyde William Tombaugh found Pluto near the position Lowell had predicted. The new planet’s mass, however, seemed insufficient to account for the perturbations of Neptune, and the search for a possible tenth planet continues.\n\nPluto revolves about the Sun once in 247.7 years at an average distance of 5.9 billion km (3.67 billion mi). The orbit is so eccentric that at certain points along its path Pluto is closer to the Sun than is Neptune. No possibility of collision exists, however, because Pluto’s orbit is inclined by more than 17.2° to the plane of the ecliptic and never actually crosses Neptune’s path.\n\nVisible only through large telescopes, Pluto is seen to have a yellowish colour. For many years very little was known about the planet, but in 1978 astronomers discovered a relatively large moon orbiting Pluto at a distance of only about 19,000 km (12,000 mi) and named it Charon. The orbits of Pluto and Charon caused them to pass repeatedly in front of one another from 1985 to 1990, enabling astronomers to determine their sizes fairly accurately. Pluto is 2,284 km (1,420 mi) in diameter, and Charon is 1,192 km (740 mi) in diameter, making them even more like a double-planet system than are the Earth and its moon. Pluto was also found to have a thin atmosphere, probably of methane, exerting a pressure on the planet’s surface that is about 100,000 times weaker than the Earth’s atmospheric pressure at sea level. The atmosphere appears to condense and form polar caps during Pluto’s long winter. The first map of Pluto’s surface was made by the Hubble Space Telescope. It shows vague light and dark regions of unknown origin.\n\nWith a density about twice that of water, Pluto is apparently made of much rockier material than are the other planets of the outer solar system. This may be the result of the kind of cold-temperature/low-pressure chemical combinations that took place during the formation of the planet. Some astronomers have suggested that Pluto may be a former satellite of Neptune, knocked into a separate orbit during the early days of the solar system. Charon would then be an accumulation of the lighter materials resulting from the collision.
689153
In their current orbits, Pluto and Neptune will never collide, since Pluto is in a 3-to-2 resonance with Neptune.  That means that for every two orbits of Pluto, Neptune executes three orbits; thus, they’re never close to one another in their trips around the Sun (instead, Neptune is always 90 degrees ahead of or behind Pluto when Pluto is closest to the Sun).  Even though the orbits of Neptune and Pluto seem to overlap, they will never actually collide.\n\nMany of the newly-discovered objects (hundreds of ’em now) out near Pluto have these kinds of resonances.  If they didn’t, they’d be more likely to collide with Neptune, and Neptune is probably responsible for shepherding them into these stable configurations.\n\n\nRyan Wyatt\nRose Center for Earth & Space\nNew York, New York
774555
Pluto has been officially demoted from its status as a planet.\n\nhttp://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/headline_universe/solar_system/stories_2006/pluto_nonplanet_aug_2006.html\n\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto\n\nExperts say Pluto is NOT a planet\n\nhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_5280000/newsid_5282400/5282434.stm\n\nhttp://www.timeforkids.com/TFK/news/story/0,6260,1333579,00.html\n\nhttp://hurricanes.nasa.gov/solar_system/science/pluto.html\n\nGood luck.\n\nKevin, Liverpool, England.
128594
Right now the Voyager and Pioneer craft are still travelling away from the earth.  Voyager 1 is over 8 billion miles away from us, which is way out past Pluto.  It's even theorized that Voyager 1 has actaully entered true interstellar space.
806256
The International Astronomical Union decided that Pluto was no longer a planet. The reason is that while Pluto is round, orbits the sun, and has three moons, it has not cleared (via gravity) its own orbit of debris.  Instead, they decided to classify it as a "dwarf planet".\n\nSee the details below.\n\nRESOLUTION 5A\nThe IAU therefore resolves that "planets" and other bodies in our Solar System, except satellites, be defined into three distinct categories in the following way:\n\n(1) A "planet" [footnote 1] is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.\n\n(2) A "dwarf planet" is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape [footnote 2] , (c) has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit, and (d) is not a satellite.\n\n(3) All other objects [footnote 3] except satellites orbiting the Sun shall be referred to collectively as "Small Solar-System Bodies".\n\n\nFootnote 1: The eight "planets" are: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.\n\nFootnote 2: An IAU process will be established to assign borderline objects into either dwarf planet and other categories.\n\nFootnote 3: These currently include most of the Solar System asteroids, most Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), comets, and other small bodies.\n\nRESOLUTION 6A\nThe IAU further resolves:\n\nPluto is a "dwarf planet" by the above definition and is recognized as the prototype of a new category of trans-Neptunian objects.
1101184
2003UB313. Although its still not officially a "planet". Neither is Pluto for that matter. From what I know UB313 is an educated assumption made because of a variance in  Pluto's orbit. In other words something is causing Pluto to "move" a certain way along its orbit. It would definately take  a large celestial object to cause this to happen but Im not sure if it has definately been determined that its a planet
667527
Nice links. I would think that Pluto is still a planet. Its mean radius relative to earth's radius is approximately 0.46. So the diameter at equator might be some 3600 miles. By comparison, a satellite like Nereid, which orbits the planet Neptune, is no more than 200 miles in diameter. At its size Pluto must be a planet.\nI am not sure about Sedna. If we think about the 10-th planet, or the "X" planet, it was thought to be three times as massive as Saturn, and nearly six billion miles from the earth. It looks to me that Sedna might not be our 10-th planet. But then again, perhaps we just have to wait and see.
709800
As they said, they use gravity to "slingshot" around the greatest gravity well there is nearby, the sun.  The Voyager probe had to slingshot around the sun to be able to get speeds great enough to leave the Solar System.  Also, by slinging around the sun, we have been able to reach Jupiter and Mars, and further on out.  So, humans have taken lessons from comets on this matter!
352951
Probably because, as many astronomers think, Pluto isn't really a true planet, but a huge asteroid that once had a very erratic orbit that has gradually stabilized over time.
500795
Over 2 years ago, scientists DID find a 10th planet beyond Pluto, and it's even larger than Pluto. The planet is a typical member of the Kuiper belt, but its sheer size in relation to the nine known planets means that it can only be classified as a planet. Currently about 97 times further from the sun than the Earth, the planet is the farthest-known object in the solar system, and the third brightest of the Kuiper belt objects. \n\nFor images and info, check the NASA web site: http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/newplanet-072905.html