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."

Comments

Re:All this effort to visit a non-planet.

[Dr. Eggman]

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.

I suggested this and some other "Kodak Moments"

[hendric]

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.
Enjoying my 15 minutes of fame. :)

Doesn't anyone care about space anymore?

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor]

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.