The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet (7 page)

Not knowing that objects larger than Pluto awaited discovery in the Kuiper belt, Tombaugh was unwittingly suggesting that Pluto become a Kuiperoid as well. In any case, astronomers are not likely to adopt a word that sounds like a contagious skin disease.

Clearly frustrated by all the talk of reworking a time-honored classification scheme, Tombaugh proceeds to attack other astronomical traditions that carry historical concepts into the present, including our entrenched and arcane classification system for the spectra of stars:

Tombaugh now raises “cane” as he goes in for the kill:

Who are any of us to argue with the octogenarian discoverer of Pluto?

Just like Paul Revere, John Henry, Paul Bunyan, Davy Crockett, and other folk heroes, Clyde Tombaugh is memorialized in song. Written in 1996 by New York–based singer-songwriter Christine Lavin, “Planet X” (see Appendix B for complete lyrics) is a hilarious, historical account of Pluto, from before it was discovered through Tombaugh’s modern efforts to protect its planethood:

Lavin’s 119 lines of text, sung in a kind of folk-rap style, include references to Disney:

To disgruntled horoscope readers:

And to an empathetic (de-sainted) St. Christopher:

Lavin was inspired to write the song after reading an article on Pluto by Sal Ruibal in the March 4, 1996, edition of
USA Today
.

Clyde Tombaugh died January 17, 1997, just a couple of weeks short of his February 4 birthday, when he would have turned 91. He was a leading force for Pluto, but he was not alone in his support of planethood. Behind him were many whose professional research interests focused on Pluto and who wanted to see a mission sent there. By the 1990s, space probes had flown by, or visited, every planet in the solar system but Pluto. Some groups vying for space missions invented catchy slogans to help sell a flyby of Pluto to Congress, like “the first mission to the last planet.” Phrases such as that imply (1) that the concept of “planet” is strong and real, (2) that Pluto is a planet, and (3) that once you’ve been to Pluto, your reconnaissance of the planets is complete. Such paradigms require, of course, that Pluto be a planet. In addition, there was legitimate, if unspoken, concern that if Pluto were demoted to “ice ball,” or anything less than planet, then funding for a major Pluto mission could be jeopardized. Why? If Pluto was just a ball of ice, astrophysicists could simply study a passing comet and save the American public the money required to travel 4 billion miles to the outer solar system.

Gerard Kuiper himself voted for demotion of Pluto before anybody else, but for reasons we would deem trivial today. A news story from the science section of
Time
magazine from February 20, 1956, was prophetically titled “Demoted Planet.”
¹⁹
The editors begin bluntly—“Astronomers have always felt uncertain about Pluto…”—and go on to list the well-known (oddball) features that distinguish Pluto from the rest of the nine, ending the opening paragraph with, “These deviations suggest that Pluto may not be a real planet.” Then, in the next paragraph,
Time
reports Kuiper’s additional, but retrospectively lame, argument for demotion:

Figure 4.4.
Cartoonist Tom Briscoe understood Pluto’s needs in times of despair.

Unknown to Kuiper (and to anybody else) at the time, Venus, Earth’s “sister” planet, takes 243 days to spin once on its axis, which is 18 days longer than it takes Venus to orbit the Sun itself. In other words, the Venus day is longer than the Venus year, yet nobody is rushing to demote Venus. Mercury has a long day too, lasting two-thirds of its year. Such are the risks of classifying an object on the premise that you have isolated its fundamental features for all time.

After a year
of advising the trustees of the American Museum of Natural History on what they might do to reverse the precipitous drop in attendance at its famed Hayden Planetarium, I was appointed acting director. A year after that, in May 1996, museum president Ellen Futter and provost Michael Novacek (a dinosaur paleontologist) formally appointed me as the first occupant of a newly endowed chair, becoming the Hayden Planetarium’s ninth director. From day one, my immediate and biggest task was to serve as project scientist for the creation of the museum’s new $230 million Rose Center for Earth and Space, named for New York real estate magnate and museum trustee Frederick P. Rose and his wife, Sandra P. Rose, the source of its lead gift and the source of the named academic chair that I occupy. This new facility would contain a freshly conceived and outfitted Hayden Planetarium as part of a huge museum wing dedicated to the universe.

Four principal entities collaborated to shape the look, feel, and content of the Rose Center: (1) the architectural firm Polshek and Partners; (2) the exhibition design firm Ralph Appelbaum and Associates, known to many for their work on the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.; (3) the science advisory committee, of which I served as chair, consisting of staff scientists hired for just this purpose:

• James Sweitzer, a University of Chicago astrophysicist turned education professional
  
• Frank Summers, a Princeton cosmologist
  
• Steven Soter, a planetary scientist who apprenticed at Cornell University
  
• Charles Liu, a Columbia University expert on galaxy formation and evolution
  

as well as selected colleagues drawn from outside the museum with expertise in subfields of astrophysics not represented in the profiles of the local staff; and (4) scientific visualization professionals, led by the astrophysically literate artist Dennis Davidson.

In the old days, a planetarium visit would target the sky show. The exhibits that lined the feeder corridors were what occupied your idle time while waiting for the show to start. By the late twentieth century, however, astrophysicists had compiled much more than a planetarium show’s worth of information about the universe. So our task was not to face-lift the existing facility, but to invent something entirely new. Besides designing and acquiring state-of-the-art technology to deliver what we now call space shows, we were constructing a unique and arresting architectural facility that would offer ample three-dimensional exhibit spaces suitable for telling cosmic stories on a grand scale.

The basic architectural design of the Rose Center became a matter of public record in January 1995. It would be a huge, 87-foot-diameter sphere, containing the planetarium space theater within its upper half and another theater in the lower half, featuring a walk through the recreation of the Big Bang. The entire sphere would be supported from its sides, appearing to float above a sprawling Hall of the Universe below it, all strikingly lit within a cubic glass building and visible from the street. We spent the next two years establishing our philosophical approaches to the interplay of design and content before we began three years of total reconstruction in January 1997, during which we turned our attention to the exhibit text and other detailed features of the content. Given how common spheres are in the universe, we knew from the start that the Hayden sphere should serve not only as an enclosure but as an element of exhibitry.

Figure 4.5.
The Frederick Phineas and Sandra Priest Rose Center for Earth and Space, seen at night, containing the Hayden Sphere. This $230 million facility opened to the public on Saturday, February 19, 2000, with solar system exhibits that grouped Pluto with the swarm of icy bodies in the outer solar system known as the Kuiper belt, instead of with the other eight planets of the solar system. This decision made a page 1 story in the
New York Times
and angered schoolchildren across the country.

To plan content, we first needed to assess the shelf life of various astrophysical subjects. For example, ever since Copernicus, we’ve been convinced that Earth goes around the Sun and not the other way around. That would be content of long shelf life that we can boldly cut into metal displays.

In the moderate shelf life category, there’s the question of water on Mars. Consensus says that the flowing liquid water that used to be there is currently locked in permafrost, but that notion could get modified by the discoveries of curious rovers on any next NASA mission to the Red Planet. So we display this text and related images with replaceable rear-lit transparencies. Science of possibly brief shelf life would include late-breaking discoveries, any intriguing hypothesis, anything waiting to be verified or trashed by another group of researchers with a different discovery or a more comprehensive theory. For that we simply show videos of research scientists giving their latest ideas. No transparencies. No cut metal. Just swappable video content. Where a given topic landed in these three tiers of information determined the nature of the exhibit treatment it received—which is code for how much money we spent to create the exhibit.

We hired Steven Soter in November 1997, luring him away from the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Soter’s résumé includes collaborating with Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan on the writing of the landmark PBS series
Cosmos
. Just a few months after his arrival, Steve handed me a February 1998
Atlantic Monthly
article on Pluto titled, “When Is a Planet Not a Planet?” written by journalist David H. Friedman. At the top Steve politely penned: “Perhaps we should look into this!” He (correctly) figured that the issues raised in the article might influence the content of our planet exhibits, which were still under design.

I decided to write an essay of my own on the subject, which became “Pluto’s Honor,” for the February 1999 issue of
Natural History
magazine,
²⁰
timed to coincide with the month that Pluto, in its badly elongated trajectory, recrossed the orbit of Neptune after 20 years, once again becoming the farthest planet in the solar system. My intent was not only to celebrate Pluto’s regaining its far-out status, but also to review the saga and character of Pluto; raise the historical analogy with the asteroid Ceres, which had been labeled a planet when discovered in 1801; and generally address what was simmering in the minds of planetary scientists. At the end of the article, having laid out the various parameters and arguments, I offered a last gasp of sentiment for the little fellow: