Slashdot Mirror
New Horizons Releases Results
hendric writes to mention New Horizons had a press conference yesterday for the preliminary results from their Jupiter flyby. Quite a few images are also available on their site, like Europa Rising."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
It may be a non-planet, but none of the Kuiper belt objects have been studied yet, and Pluto is a start.
I wish the astronomy groups would get their adjective usage right, or at least consistent. A dwarf planet is somehow not a planet, but a dwarf star is a star. Sol is a dwarf star, so does that make it not a star? That sort of dissonance makes calling Ceres a planet seem sensible in comparison. Anyway, I support the notion of not calling Pluto a planet, I'm just disappointed that they had to odd twisting of words to do it.
Because nothing has been the way we thought it would be:
-Before we orbited the moon, everyone assumed the back would look like the front
-Before we sent a probe to Mars, nobody knew what to expect, anything a Martian civilization to... something like the Moon. Even now Mars has many aspects to it that deny simple explanation, things like what lies more than a few inches below its surface or why it has anomalous amounts of methane in its atmosphere
-Before we sent a probe to Jupiter, everyone assumed that the moons there would be cold, inanimate frozen rocks... rather than posessing the largest volcanoes and deepest oceans in the solar system
-Before we landed a probe on Titan, speculation was rife about what could be there, because you just couldn't tell. Now that have a vague idea, it's weirder than anybody guessed
If I can assure you one thing about Pluto, it will be that absolutely no one will have predicted what will be there correctly. And that's what makes it worth looking.