In the third decade of the last century, Clyde Tombaugh was given the job of finding the mysterious ‘Planet X’. Here his family remembers the man. In early 1930, after an exhaustive search, Tombaugh finally discovered a small object orbiting beyond Neptune. It was immediately hailed as the ninth planet, and named by a young British girl for the god of the underworld. That same year, Walt Disney Studios introced a new character, a dog named Pluto. In many astronomers’ view, Pluto is still a planet. The I.A.U. resolution of several years ago is not universally accepted. In just over a year, In 2015, we saw our first closeup views of this distant object through the eyes of the New Horizons mission encounters the planet. That mission gave us many images, as well as data which shows that Pluto is a far more interesting object than we could have possibly imagined. One of the invstigators on the New Horizons team was Cranbrook Kingswood alum Kathy Olkin. .
Carpe Caelum Planetary Astronomy