# Pluto

*In the Solar System*

A dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, smaller than the Moon, counted as the ninth planet from 1930 until 2006. Its orbit is tilted and elliptical enough to bring it inside Neptune's for twenty years at a time. New Horizons flew past in 2015 and found nitrogen-ice plains without a crater on them, water-ice mountains three kilometres high and a haze in the thin atmosphere - a small world still doing something, which nobody expected this far from the Sun.

| | |
| --- | --- |
| Radius | 1,188 km |
| Around the equator | 7,466 km |
| Mass | 1.3 x 10^22 kg |
| Compared with the Earth | 0.002 × |
| Turns once in | 6.4 d |
| From the Sun | 5,324,612,982 km (+102,882 km/d) |
| From the Earth | 5,208,391,895 km (+1,773,574 km/d) |
| A signal takes | 4 h 50 m |

Distances and speed are computed from JPL Horizons trajectories and are true of 2026-09-05, changing at the rate given beside each. The interpolation itself is good to a few kilometres; what ages these figures is the date, not the arithmetic.

## Elsewhere

- On the live map: https://www.orbitalmap.space/?world=solar-system&focus=pluto
- This object as a page: https://www.orbitalmap.space/o/pluto/
- Every object: https://www.orbitalmap.space/o/
- What this site is and what it reads: https://www.orbitalmap.space/llms.txt