OK, so I'm a geek and I'm incredibly excited about New Horizons finally reaching Pluto. When I was in elementary school, every few years National Geographic would have these awesome issues on Jupiter, Mars, Uranus, the space probes and maps of an entirely unexplored planet!! Olympus Mons, volcanoes on Io, methane lakes on Titan. The Russian Venus landers were cool as well.

In more recent years, the Japanese landed on a comet. Multiple heartbreaks and triumphs on Mars. Deep Space One marked the beginnings of turning space SF into reality. The Lunar X-prize and the commercialization of space.

Still, there were so many big dream disappointments in (Earth's) space program. A space station that's more than a curiosity. Lunar return mission(s). Permanent lunar base. A space station in a Lagrange point. Exploitation of cycler orbits. The dead-end space shuttle program, Buran as well. People out of Earth's gravity well on a regular basis.

Even if New Horizons pancakes on an asteroid after flying 3 billion miles it is already an inspiration. Or at least a breath toward keeping big dreams alive.

So, is anyone else excited by this?

Agreed...cool info coming back from New Horizons! #PlutoIsAPlanet

I am totally stoked!! The pictures of Pluto are incredible and although I don't necessarily think that it should become a planet again, I think it will because we've seen it and sort of humanized it.

Maybe this will get everybody interested in space again...

It would be perfectly reasonable to call Pluto a planet. What you can't do is have the traditional 9 planets. If Pluto is a planet so are the other 20 KBOs that are known and any others we find. So either 8 or 30+.

They should have just grandfathered Pluto in. The definition of a planet is somewhat arbitrary and open to interpretation anyway.

Exactly! But I think that's why they won't do it. Of course, I think it'd be cool if we suddenly got twenty-some-odd new planets. :P

I for one would have no problem calling Ceres and the other big spherical asteroids planets. If they're big enough to be spherical and not orbiting something else they're planets in my book. This means we have four or five planets between Mars and Jupiter, of course, but so what?

Also,

Call me sentimental, but Pluto is still a planet to me. Teaching engrained that young tends to stick. Give it a couple more generations, and no one will care, but the wound is still fresh for those of us who grew up being taught that there are nine planets in our solar system. <shrug>

I, too, have been glued to the images coming in of Pluto. It's amazing to get such clear glimpses of something so incredibly far away. Science rocks!

Good one, Marcus, with the image above! I especially giggled at the Kuiper belt loops. Ah, nerd humor.

XKCD cartoons always have title text when you hover on the image. For that one the text is "After decades of increasingly confused arguing, Pluto is reclassified as a 'dwarf Pluto.'"

Haha, that's a great picture Marcus! I especially loved "Serenity" and "JPEG Plumes"

I mean this both literally and figuratively: Far out!

Joy,
Lynn

p.s., I'm just a little young to use that phrase under normal circumstances, but it was the most appropriate one I could think of.