Slashdot Mirror
More on the Pluto-Kuiper Express
addie writes "Scientific American has a great, extensive article about Pluto and the possibilities of exploring it in the near future. Neat descriptions of Kuiper Belt and what we can learn about solar system birth and growth from the tiny planet."
It is the last planetary body not yet visited by at least a flyby spacecraft.
It is a double planet where the relative masses are such that both bodies are tidally locked and this is true of no other planet although the Moon is tidally locked to us.
The atmosphere is freezing out and will be only snow in less than two decades, and won't unfreeze until the 23rd century.
We've never seen a Kuiper Belt object close up, although a lot of stars appear to have them, giving us clues about other star systems, the origin of planets and our early solar system.
Most importantly, if we don't look now, we in this generation will be the ones that got a look at everything except Pluto instead of everything. I won't live to see other star systems close up, but I would like to finish seeing this one.
It's all find and nice of them to have ideas about exploring Pluto now but its too late for the fun stuff. If they had launched a craft 5 years ago we would have gotten there in time to witness the changing of the seasons.
Now its going to be another 250 years before we get to see both the summer and winter time on the planet. And what a seasonal change it is. In the summer it has a liquid nitrogen atmosphere and in the winter it freezes and falls to the ground.
If only they had gotten off their but sooner.
Ascii artist &
48 gigabits of radiation-hardened memory must cost a fortune...I seem to remember that Flash ram is not suited to this kind of thing since its especially susceptible to energetic particles (alpha, gamma rays) dislogding the charge trapped in the gate dielectric (which holds the information.) Anyone know how data storage is usually carried out on these things? I can't imagine using anything with moving parts, and since the craft is supposed to be powered down for most of the time while it drifts, I'd think you'd want something non-volatile. I would hate to think what would happen if there was a brief power shortage or something and all the readings from the entire mission that were queued up to be sent were lost.
As to the 770 bits/s, I'm amazed it's even that fast. Consider that the RF power decreases as 1/r^2, where r is about 7.5 billion km. They are using a directional 2.5m antenna, lets say that's 100 dBi gain. Still, even if they managed to transmit 10W at the satellite (which is a lot for radio), we'd receive about a picowatt (1e-12) of it here on earth. I've heard that number thrown around before as a typical power level that we receive from deep space, and it boggles the mind that we can detech such faint signals... guess that's why it takes arrays of gigantic dishes with supercooled LNAs to do it. And it's great example of how power and bandwidth are related in communications. The more power your signal has at the receiver, the more information you can convey (bandwidth.)
they told him they were going to see Pluto the disney character. His eyes lit up and he jumped up and down saying "oh boy oh boy".
Compare budgets. Manned Mars missions are currently being placed in the 20-50 billion $ range, relatively unambitious shuttle replacements at 10 bn, and space elevators are still at the "let's do some possibly related basic science and see if anything interesting drops out" stage. PKE is budgetted at US$500m. It's not making any real dent in the budgets for the kind of programs you like.
There are several good reasons to study Pluto ASAP, not the least of which is the changing of the seasons. It's not really a Pluto mission as much as it's a Kuiper Belt mission. Among other things:
And anyway, how much would scuttling this mission help to explore Mars, which compared to this tiny mission already has a massive armada of effort and funding going into it? Maybe we'd get there a couple of months faster.. except we wouldn't anyway because the optimal launch window would stay where it was.
To me this quote represents some of the best ideals of the so-called western civilization. There's a deep-rooted sense of purpose in pushing the barriers of scientific knowledge and understanding. Despite the fact that military is also interested in any advances stemming from such exploration the ultimate aim is to have this knowledge advance the whole of humanity.
So how does terrorism - as demonstrated by the relatively recent islamic jihad against the western world - fit into this picture? Well, for a long time while "The Old World" was suffering under the Dark Ages (imposed by religion, the Church) the islamic empire had a thriving scientific culture. That fine and rather benevolent islamic culture was eventually suffocated by increasing religious dogmatism so it is highly ironic that those same forces are now attempting to destroy the West where the evolution of the State and Religion followed the opposite route.
I don't think I'm much off the mark by saying that the driving force, or motive, behind the actions of the "ultra-islamic" terrorists is simple envy and the desire to pull the West down to the same level of stagnation and religious revival that they themselves are under. If the western governments, and especially the US, decrease their scientific commitments in favour of military spending the religious terrorists have gained a victory of sorts.
PS. Would it not be ironic if scientific missions such as this one to study the Kuiper Belt would help us (the humanity) to better understand dangerous asteroids and help us learn how to repel them. Suppose just one, say 10 miles across, was on a collision course with Earth and was calculated to strike the Middle East in the 2030's. Would the Mid-East populations still support the destruction of the West? Of course, if the object was calculated to hit North America or even Europe there would probably be much rejoicing in God punishing the infidels...
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
They don't get it at first, but they figure it out because in some part, the maps they find obviously display the solar system, but some things are very different, and they come to the conclusion that the original contractor screwed up the original job.
Who knows what we'll find.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"