How Many Solar System


The conspiracy that Fox missed (well, they do miss a lot) is called by its adherents "Alternative 3". Its promoters are shadowy individuals like Bill Cooper, a formal US Naval Briefing Team member with access to state secrets, who claims that an advanced American space presence is a reality. In Behold a Pale Horse, he reports that "A moon base, Luna, was photographed by the Lunar Orbiter and filmed by Apollo astronauts... I can say that 'Alternative 003' (a British TV documentary on this subject) is at least 70% true from my own knowledge and the knowledge of my sources." But small moons like Methone are usually geologically inactive and bereft of an atmosphere. Therefore, they are usually unable to smooth away the scars. Dr. Peter Thomas of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, explained it this way in the May 17, 2013 New Scientist: "When we look at objects less than 200 kilometers in radius, they are all like potatoes. They have lumps, grooves, craters." This makes Methone's smooth surface a mystery. Dr. Thomas is a Cassini team member. The Kuiper Belt. Dark, distant, and cold, the Kuiper Belt is the remote domain of an icy multitude of comet nuclei, that orbit our Sun in a strange, fantastic, and fabulous dance. Here, in the alien deep freeze of our Solar System's outer suburbs, the ice dwarf planet Pluto and its quintet of moons dwell along with a cornucopia of others of their bizarre and frozen kind. This very distant region of our Star's domain is so far from our planet that astronomers are only now first beginning to explore it, thanks to the historic visit to the Pluto system by NASA's very successful and productive New Horizons spacecraft on July 14, 2015. New Horizons is now well on its way to discover more and more long-held secrets belonging to this distant, dimly lit domain of icy worldlets.