Pluto remains an important object for study, though. Today it is considered one of many dwarf planets beyond Neptune, in a doughnut-shaped region of mostly icy debris orbiting the Sun called the Kuiper Belt . These outskirts of the solar system remain largely unexplored. They were first reached by US space agency Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft; it flew close to Pluto in 2015, revealing spectacular images of the dwarf planet's surface and atmosphere. But there's still plenty to learn.
That's why my colleagues and I at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) were over the moon when we were invited to participate in an international mission funded by Nasa . We are a group of experienced nuclear physicists with groundbreaking research that spans astronomy and stellar explosions.
Pluto reached its closest point to our sun in 1989 . As it moves away from the sun along its 248-year-long oval-shaped orbit, its atmosphere will likely collapse and freeze onto its surface in the next few years.
Some modification was also required. The telescope arrived from the factory with a faulty GPS that was replaced and a little too short for our purposes. We used 3D printing technology in the university's Modern African Nuclear Detector Laboratory to rectify the length and match the telescope focal point.
The viewing spot was in a remote area in the Northern Cape, about 40km north of Upington. This was precisely the central point or dead centre of Pluto's shadow on Earth, extending 2 377km in diameter, passing across South Africa and Namibia at 85 000km/h. Considering that, at the same time, our Earth is also moving at an orbital velocity of 107 000 km/h, nailing just the right timing and position for our telescope was crucial.
