Free Astronomy Magazine September-October 2015

4 PLANETOLOGY A faultless mission, that of New Horizons: after a journey of nine and a half years it finally made its rendezvous with Pluto one minute earlier than predicted and perform- ed its task in the best of ways, revealing a world remarkably more lively and varied than we could have imagined. In these pages, we offer our readers a preview of the new face of Pluto and some of its satellites. Astonishi SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2015 by Michele Ferrara O nly Pluto was still missing for complet- ing the initial recon- naissance of the solar sys- tem, and the primary goal of NASA's New Horizons mission was precisely to fill this gap. Compared to earlier achievements by other space- crafts, this seemed a far minor objec- tive, so much so that hardly anyone ex- pected to see anything more than a dark globe crystallized by some billions of years, at most marked by impacts of small