It has been dubbed the pipsqueak of the planetary system, had a Walt Disney cartoon dog named after it, and now produced a new generation of Plutocrats peddling T-shirts with slogans calling for its salvation.
It used to be the ninth planet, the smallest member of our solar system and known to schoolkids the world over since its discovery in 1930.
Now it's just a lump of rock among thousands, 4.6 billion miles from the Sun in a region of space beyond the planet Neptune known as the Kuiper Belt. It's tough being Pluto.
Not that its demotion from a planet to a member of a new group of objects called dwarf-planets was a simple affair, as recent events at the top-dog star gazers' convention - the International Astronomical Union (IAU) - in Prague last month testified.
There has long been controversy over what constitutes a planet and the meeting, representing about 10,000 astronomers worldwide, set about fixing the definition.
At first it seemed easy. A planet had to go round the sun, the governing committee agreed. It also had to have enough self-gravity to be roughly spherical and could not host thermo-nuclear reactions or it would be by definition a star. Those criteria allowed Pluto, at less than half the Earth's diameter, to remain a planet and let in three other Kuiper Belt objects as well, including the largest, called UB313, nicknamed Xena, discovered by California Institute of Technology's Michael Brown in 2003.