"Discovering Pluto is an authoritative account of the exploration of Pluto and its moons from the first inklings of tentative knowledge through the exciting discoveries made during the flyby of the NASA New Horizons research spacecraft in July 2015. Co-author Dale P. Cruikshank was a co-investigator on the New Horizons mission, while co-author William Sheehan is a noted historian of the Solar System. Telling the tale of Pluto's discovery, the authors recount the grand story of our unfolding knowledge of the outer Solar System, from William Herschel's serendipitous discover of Uranus in 1781, to the 1846 mathematical prediction of Neptune's existence, to Percival Lowell's studies of the wayward motions of those giant planets leading to his prediction of another world farther out."--Dust jacket flap.