{"id":6545,"date":"2015-07-14T14:03:15","date_gmt":"2015-07-14T18:03:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=6545"},"modified":"2015-07-14T14:03:15","modified_gmt":"2015-07-14T18:03:15","slug":"rediscovering-pluto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=6545","title":{"rendered":"Rediscovering Pluto"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Clyde Tombaugh<\/a> had only graduated from Burdett High School in Burdett, Kansas, when we applied for a position at\u00a0Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. His family didn’t have the money to send him to college, so he studied on his own, assembled a portfolio, and presented himself to the observatory director, V. M. Slipher. While working there as a\u00a0photographic assistant, he discovered two comets and variety of other stellar objects including Pluto.<\/p>\n

We haven’t had a good look at the once-and-future-planet until today. NASA’s New Horizons probe is passing by Pluto, carrying Tombaugh’s ashes<\/a> and sending photos back to us. Will we discover the truth of what many sci-fi authors have written about this place over the last 85 years? Gregory Benford describes some of those details<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In his first novel, World of Ptavvs<\/em>, Larry Niven depicted an astronaut landing in the Plutonian atmosphere, his vessel\u2019s hot exhaust releasing the frozen methane and oxygen and causing the entire planet to burst into flames. In a later story, Niven imagined an even odder fate. A stranded astronaut freezes, only to find that his nervous system has become superconducting and that he can still think, frozen solid. . . .\u00a0My own 2006 novel, The Sunborn<\/em><\/a>, has small, smart creatures thriving along the shore of Pluto\u2019s supposed nitrogen sea.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clyde Tombaugh had only graduated from Burdett High School in Burdett, Kansas, when we applied for a position at\u00a0Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. His family didn’t have the money to send him to college, so he studied on his own, assembled a portfolio, and presented himself to the observatory director, V. M. Slipher. While working … Continue reading Rediscovering Pluto<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,10],"tags":[1978,2227,2510],"class_list":["post-6545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-nonfiction","tag-nasa","tag-pluto","tag-science-fiction"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6545\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}