Pluto gets the boot!

CNN has the story:

For now, membership will be restricted to the eight "classical" planets in the solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Much-maligned Pluto doesn't make the grade under the new rules for a planet: "a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a ... nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit."

Pluto is automatically disqualified because its oblong orbit overlaps with Neptune's.

Instead, it will be reclassified in a new category of "dwarf planets," similar to what long have been termed "minor planets." The definition also lays out a third class of lesser objects that orbit the sun -- "small solar system bodies," a term that will apply to numerous asteroids, comets and other natural satellites.

I wonder what all the poor Pluto-fetishist whiners will say. Will they still love their eccentric icball, now that its a dwarf planet, along with Ceres?

Aside from being a political analyst and rocketry expert, Maniak is also an astronomy geek! And Maniak only posts on Internal Monologue! Here's his reaction to part of the CNN.com story linked to above:

CNN.com says: "It was unclear how Pluto's demotion might affect the mission of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which earlier this year began a 91/2-year journey to the oddball object to unearth more of its secrets."

Is CNN proposing that they might have to turn around and go home now that the classification of the target of the New Horizons probe has changed? These reporters are literally not rocket scientists. There could be some changes here and there to some of the detailed plan for the encounter based on what looks most scientifically interesting, but there isn't anything more irrelevant to the process than what Pluto is called.