![]() ![]() The New Horizons science team had been using Sputnik Planitia and the Hayabusa and Voyager terras to informally describe the regions that the mission discovered during its close-up look at Pluto's surface. Voyager 2 was the first and only spacecraft to date to fly by the planets Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space in 2012. In addition to honoring Sputnik, the IAU's first 14 approved Pluto place names include "Hayabusa Terra," named after Japan's Hayabusa mission that achieved the first asteroid sample return in 2010, and "Voyager Terra," honoring the pair of probes NASA launched 40 years ago to explore the outer solar system. Pluto's first official surface-feature names are marked on this map, compiled from images and data gathered by NASA's New Horizons during its flyby of Pluto in 2015. "The designations honor many people and space missions who paved the way for the historic exploration of Pluto and the Kuiper Belt," said Alan Stern, New Horizons' principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute. Sputnik Planitia is among the first official Pluto feature names approved by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the world governing body for naming celestial locations. The Sputnik plain was first seen by NASA's New Horizons, which became the historic first spacecraft to fly by Pluto in July 2015. ![]() The small (23 inch or 58 centimeter) polished metal sphere circled Earth in an elliptical orbit that at its farthest extended 590 miles (950 kilometers) above the planet. Earth's first artificial satellite, launched 60 years ago next month, journeyed only a short distance into space, but its legacy now reaches out to the farthest ends of our traditional solar system.Ī large plain on the surface of the dwarf planet Pluto has been officially given the name "Sputnik Planitia," after the former Soviet Union's Sputnik satellite launched on Oct. ![]()
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