We were all in the dark about Pluto.
For the nearly 75 years since its discovery, Pluto was a mystery, mainly because of its distance – between 2.66 billion and 4.67 billion miles from Earth. That distance prevented us from discovering more about Pluto; in 1994, the best image we could get from the Hubble telescope was a pixelated blur.
Community College of Aurora's March 18 Sherlin Lecture, “New Views of Pluto & Its Moons” allowed CCA students, interested community members, and others to discover new things about Pluto – some of which were hypothesized and others we had no idea about. A July fly-by of the New Horizons space probe answered many questions we had about the dwarf planet – and spurred a great deal more.
Making her second appearance at CCA, NASA scientist Kimberly Ennico-Smith presented about what the space agency discovered last summer with New Horizons. Ennico-Smith previously spoke at CCA in April 2014 for the Sherlin Lecture “To Pluto and Beyond.”