Dale P. Cruikshank, William Sheehan.
Discovering Pluto: exploration at the edge of the solar system.
University of Arizona Press. 2018
With the New Horizons flyby of Pluto in July 2015,
the Grand Tour of the Solar System,
which began in the 1960s with the Mariner missions
and continued with the Voyager flybys of the giant planets, was finally complete.
Pluto—originally, when the Grand Tour was first conceived,
the ninth major planet of the Solar System—together
with its anomalously large moon Charon
and the four small satellites of their system,
has been surveyed at close range.
This book presents the long and fascinating history
of searches of trans-Neptunian space by Percival Lowell
and his colleagues that led to Clyde Tombaugh’s discovery
of what seemed at the time to have been Lowell’s Planet X,
and the subsequent gradual accumulation of facts about
this small icy body on the inner edge of the Kuiper Belt.
The book is brought up to date with a summary of
the scientific results so far about this surprising world
and a look forward to the next steps planned in the exploration of the Kuiper Belt.