How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [6]
Though the moon was my favorite, I learned about planets, too. But planets were a little more abstract than the moon, since you couldn’t see them and no one had stepped on them or taken pictures from the surface. Still, by first grade I had a poster on my bedroom wall that showed the solar system with an artist’s conception of each of the planets. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, spacecraft had already visited Mars and Venus and Mercury, so some of the pictures were quite detailed. (I didn’t know about these spacecraft at the time because Huntsville was totally dedicated to the Apollo rocket program and the moon, as far as I could tell. The robotic exploration of the other planets was being run out of a small town I’d never heard of called Pasadena, on the other side of the continent.) On my poster, Mercury looked much like the moon, battered by meteors. Venus appeared only as a swirl of clouds. Mars had giant volcanoes and deep canyons. In the outer part of the solar system, things on my poster got fuzzier, since truly no one had ever seen them except through powerful telescopes; but Jupiter had its clouds and great red spot, Saturn had its rings, and Uranus and Neptune had their retinue of moons. Pluto, however, was the most exciting of them all, because it was so different from all of the other planets.
Even as a first grader I could see that Pluto didn’t travel in perfect circles around the sun the way the other planets did. I could see on the poster that it came close enough to the sun to momentarily pass inside the orbit of Neptune, but the poster showed only this inner bit of Pluto’s orbit. The outer parts of the orbit were so far away that Pluto would have to travel off my poster, onto my wall, out my window, and midway across the front yard toward the street before it turned around and came back in toward the sun. Even stranger, Pluto didn’t orbit the sun in the same nice flat disk that all of the other planets did: It was tilted away from the others by almost twenty degrees. On the poster, all of the other planets were represented by paintings of a global view of the surface seen from high above, but Pluto—only special Pluto—had a painting of what the planet would look like if you were standing on the surface looking back at the tiny dim Sun. The surface of the planet was covered in icy spires. These days I realize that the artists would have had no idea what Pluto looked like and probably felt the need to make the surface look like something interesting, but as a first grader I was thoroughly convinced that Pluto was covered in icy spires and that they would shatter at the slightest touch by a future Neil Armstrong. Clearly Pluto was different and mysterious and potentially very fragile. It would take another thirty-five years for me to learn just how fragile it really was.
In third grade we finally learned about planets in school. Most people I know memorized their order by learning some variant of the mnemonic “My very excellent mother just served us nine pizzas” for “Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto,” but for some reason, in my school we learned one that I have never heard since: “Martha visits every Monday and just stays until noon. Period.” The “and” appears between Mars and Jupiter, just where the asteroids are, though I always suspected that that was just dumb luck. The “period” at the end, though, seemed fishy even in third grade. It didn’t seem so much as to make Pluto special, as the other odd characteristics did, as much as to make Pluto seem an afterthought or a late addition or just perhaps an undesirable misfit.
Oddly, though, for a kid interested in planets, I had never been very interested in the actual night sky. Sure, I could name some of the more obvious constellations and sights—the Big Dipper, Orion, the North Star. I could point out the Milky Way galaxy, which was actually visible in the dark