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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."
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very fascinating indeed. did you guys see the pictures of the massive volcanic plume rising from Io? i remember watching Io and the 4 moons of jupiter including Ganemede from my 2.5 inch refracting telescope as a child.
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Calling the Sun a dwarf star is misleading. In terms of stars there are dwarf and giant categories, but for planets there is (now I guess) dwarf planets, planets, and gas giant planets. Our sun, is a dwarf star, but that is also called a main sequence star. Pluto is not exactly your typical planet it would seem.
Then again, I am of the mind that says pluto should be considered a planet, since even our own and those like it are dwarfed by the massive giants by many times more than it would seem we dwarf pluto. If we're going to make these kinds of petty changes like with pluto, we should just reorganize the entire system into a single 'collections of matter' scale, starting with the particles, moving up through comets, planets, gas giants, then onto stars, nebula, galaxies, what-have-yous, up to the universe itself. And we'll give these collectives a unified naming scheme so lame and mundane yet extensable and modular that it would make even Taxonomists cry themselves to sleep.
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Before the flyby, the New Horizons science team asked a bunch of us amateurs at http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/ to search for "pretty pictures", pictures that didn't necessarily have scientific value, but were beautiful and worth taking. Europa Rising and the Io and Europa conjunction were the first two returned. The others I suggested were two double shadow transits, a crescent Callisto emerging from behind a crescent Jupiter, and a crescent Ganymede in front of a crescent Jupiter. :)
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It doesn't negate your point, but Triton (moon of Neptune) was studied by Voyager 2, and is quite likely a captured KBO. I imagine Pluto will look a lot like it.
The pics are excellent and the technology is even more fascinating. I have one quick question though. Its not related to this topic in anyway. Request the mods to please not mark it offtopic as I would really appreciate replies:
I have seen a lot of photos of the Milky Way galaxy i.e. our galaxy (the pics show it being something of a spiral with our sun as a tiny dot). My question is how are these pics clicked? And how are they transmitted back to earth? As far as I know, to actually click the pic of a galaxy, you'd have to position the camera several light years away from the galaxy to get the whole view. So are there satellites sent that far out to click pics and how are they transmitted back? Is there a chain of transmitters in space at certain intervals to amplify and relay the image signal back? Any knowledge on this would be highly appreciated. Thanks.
It's sad to me that this story has so few comments. Outer space just holds less and less allure to the populace as time moves forward. Why is that? Especially as we are just starting to get some of the really sci-fi 21st century stuff going. is the 21st century to be the last century of space exploration?
It's the same with aviation in general, interest has been declining steadily. in 1980 there were 800,000 pilots in the US, now, just about 400,000.
I do believe that we are losing our exploratory drive; we are becoming more decadent?...nah. We're just exploring other things. Genetics and robotics, both will help us get up there I hope.
Well, you know what? Space is hard, and far. Maybe we just aren't ready for the journey yet.
hopefully someday at least our robots will be - they're already doing a bang-up job.
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