Here are some facts for this day. You are welcome to log your interesting, quirky or fun fact/s with your log.
On This Day - March 7th 1996
The first photographs of Pluto's surface are released.
For many years, Pluto was considered to be the ninth planet in the solar system, named after the Roman god of the underworld, Pluto. Recently, its status has been downgraded to that of a minor planet. Its largest moon is Charon, discovered in 1978, and two smaller moons, Nix and Hydra, were discovered in 2005. It remains the only planet that has not been visited by human spacecraft, and knowledge of Pluto is limited due to the fact that it is too far away for in-depth investigations with telescopes from earth.
Pluto remained undiscovered until the twentieth century due to its small size, being smaller than the Earth's moon, and its unusual orbit. It was determined to be a planet on 18 February 1930 by astronomer Clyde Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona. However, Pluto has since been reclassified as a "planetoid" and is now considered the largest member of the Kuiper belt. Like other members of the belt, it is composed primarily of rock and ice and is relatively small: approximately a fifth the mass of the Earth's moon and a third its volume.
On 7 March 1996, the first photographs of Pluto's surface were released. Astronomers had actually constructed a global map of Pluto in 1994 by taking 12 images at 4 different longitudes in visible light and 8 images in ultraviolet light. The photographs showed clear topographic features such as craters, a northern polar cap bisected by a dark strip, one bright spot and a cluster of dark spots.