"in 1942 L. Wylie at the U. S. Naval Observatory gravitationally estimated 91% of an earth, which was the mass used for the historic 1951 tables of W. Eckart, D. Brouwer, and G. Clemence (Astronomical Papers of the American Ephemeris volume 12), and which remained the official U. S. N. O. mass of Pluto until 1968."
E.-B.-C. was the first reliable numerical integration ephemeris for the whole solar system, starting a tradition carried on by E. M. Standish and his Jet Propulsion Laboratory colleagues at the California Institute of Technology with such success that special perturbations supplanted general perturbations by the 1980s as the basis for national ephemerides and for navigating spacecraft accurately to their targets.
That's... interesting I guess, but I don't really see how it relates to the topic. The tables may or may not be historically important, but they're wrong, so why include them unless they had some direct baring on the topic? Serendipodous 12:58, 30 May 2015 (UTC)
Why suppress the unchallenged fact that Rawlins published the best estimate of Pluto's mass before 1976-8?
Because he made them in 1973; five years isn't a long time for a record to stand. Besides, ALL measurements of Pluto that were smaller than previous measurements were, technically, the best measurements at that time. Serendipodous 12:58, 30 May 2015 (UTC)