Phillip Hanrahan, age 9, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for    his question:

How far away is Pluto?

Right now, the little planet Pluto is about 2,700 million miles away from us. We cannot give the exact mileage for at least two good reasons. For one thing, it is dust about impossible to measure such enormous distances down to the last mile. For another thing, the distance between Pluto and the earth is changing from moment to moment. This is because of how they orbit around the sun.

The earth has the third orbit, about 93 million miles from the sun. And it travels around very fast. Most of the time, Pluto is about 36 times farther from the sun than we are. It travels around a huge orbit and it takes a long, long time to go around its orbit. The earth, on its inside lane, is always catching up and passing Pluto. What's more, sometimes Pluto swings in closer, as it did a few years ago. Right now, the two planets are about as close as they can get. But even now, Pluto's enormous distance from us is about 2,700 million miles.