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Discovered in 1930, for 76 years Pluto was considered to be the ninth planet in the Solar System until its reclassification as dwarf planet in 2006. Pluto is now regarded as the second largest object in the Kuiper Belt, an area of icy, dark objects beyond the orbit of Neptune, left over from the formation of the Solar System. It has one large moon, Charon, which is almost half its size and two much smaller moons, Nix and Hydra. Named after the Roman god of the underworld, its distance from the Sun and Earth has delayed a realistic understanding of the dwarf planet´s characteristics. The first spacecraft to visit the faraway planet is the New Horizons probe, scheduled to reach Pluto on July 14, 2015 after nine years on its way.

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