It should arrive at Pluto in the summer of 2015. It was sent directly into an Earth -and solar -escape trajectory on its way to Pluto, Charon, and the Kuiper Belt (a large region of icy, rocky bodies located past the orbit of Neptune and continuing past Pluto ’s orbit). Administered by the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University ( Maryland), it launched successfully on January 19, 2006, from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Not enough is known about Pluto to explore these similarities this probably awaits future missions to Pluto, especially the New Horizons mission (or, Pluto-Kuiper Belt Mission) that NASA launched in 2006. Neptune ’s large satellite Triton -which has a very thin nitrogen atmosphere with clouds, plumes, and haze, an extremely cold surface with nitrogen, methane, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide ices which interact with the atmosphere, and a fairly high mean density -seems more like Pluto than the other satellites of Neptune and those of Saturn and Uranus. However they differ in the structure of their atmospheres (perhaps the more conspicuous features of Neptune ’s clouds are caused by its significant internal energy source, which Uranus lacks), the orientations of their rotation axes, and in their satellite systems. Neptune and Uranus are similar in size, mass, periods of their rotation, the overall features of their magnetic fields, and ring systems. Astronomers consider Neptune to form with Uranus a subgroup of the Jovian planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune). Neptune is about 17 times the mass of Earth, while being slightly more massive than Uranus, which is about 14 times the mass of Earth. It is the fourth largest planet by diameter of the planets in the solar system. Neptune is the eighth planet and most outermost planet from the sun (since August 2006, when Pluto was demoted to a dwarf planet).
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