Cartoon from here. Don’t get me wrong, I like my job. However, the worst part of telling people that I work on Pluto is the immediate follow-up: is it a planet? Unfortunately, the only thing most people know about Pluto is that the IAU decided it should be categorized as a dwarf planet in 2006. While there are a lot of things wrong with the IAU definition**, I think the discussion about planethood can overshadow how interesting Pluto is. The following are some questions I’d much rather you ask me about Pluto: 1. When is the spacecraft flying by Pluto? 2. Why is Pluto made of methane, nitrogen and carbon monoxide while Charon is covered in water ice? Are they really two different colors? 3. Is Pluto’s surface changing with its seasons? 4. Why is Pluto’s surface all patchy? 5. Did Pluto’s atmosphere really double between 1988 and 2002? 6. How were Pluto’s moons discovered? Do you think there are more out there? 7. Is Pluto shrinking? 8. I’ve seen pictures of Pluto taken from Earth/HST. They’re, um, lousy. How did you guys even figure any of the above stuff out from them? 9. Do you have a favorite dwarf planet after Pluto? Some of these questions have answers and some are still waiting on good old New Horizons, but I’ll try to answer some of them over the next few weeks. Next week I’ll be attending a few monthly status meetings at APL, so I plan to blog about that. **Those 700+ new planets announced by the Kepler team this week? Not actually planets according to the IAU, sorry.