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With New Horizons Spacecraft a Year Away, What We Know About Pluto
An anonymous reader writes In one year, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will reach Pluto after over 8 years of travel. "Not only did we choose the date, by the way, we chose the hour and the minute. And we're on track," says Alan Stern, the principal investigator for NASA's Pluto-Kuiper Belt Mission. As the New Horizons spacecraft gets closer to Pluto, we will begin getting the clearest images we've ever gotten. "A great deal of planning went into this mission. But in case you're wondering, the New Horizons team did not plan for Pluto to be downgraded to a dwarf planet in the same year as the launch. That didn't change anything for Alan Stern. Some planetary scientists still dispute Pluto's planet status, and Stern says he'll always think of Pluto as a planet. Either way, it's a distant realm ripe for exploration. Scientists don't know exactly what they will see there. And that's the exciting part. 'When we first sent missions to Jupiter, no one expected to find moons that would have active volcanoes. And I could go down a long list of how often I've been surprised by the richness of nature,' Stern says."
Who wants to fight?
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Right now the astronomers on the ground are rehearsing everything about the encounter, because it takes four hours for any signal to reach New Horizons and even longer to transmit anything at 1kb/s. The entire Pluto flyby will be automated: they do not have any control over what the spacecraft will see or be able to focus on at the moment of its closest approach to Pluto. The sheer number of things that have to happen at precisely the right time on this mission is insane. It's a good thing they've had a decade to pepare for this.
What the fuck is Goofy? Or Pete?
What do they expect to find on such a distant clump of rock and why is it they thought it to be a good investment to go snap a few slefies around it rather then use that money to go where things really ought to be interesting like Io and Europa?
Scientists will never send probes to Uranus.
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I am rapidly approaching the age where that is disproven
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Right now they are frantically searching for a second Kuiper Belt target within the range of the nuclear generator lifetime (+5 years?). But they have not found one yet. They would hope to set the course shortly after leaving Pluto.
Gosh Mickey! I gained a few pounds and all, but no need to call me a planet.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
A single relatively inexpensive ($650 Million, Compared to $2.5 Billion for MSL) probe isn't too much to explore the one of the most distant solid bodies in the solar system. Nothing is really known about its surface beyond that it has some features (known via extremely blurry telescope images) and it has significant seasonal changes, the cause of which are barely theorized.
I can't wait until Pluto is reclassified again, this time as a derelict alien spacecraft orbiting at the edge of our solar system.
"Planet" is NOT Boolean. There is no clear-but boundary and all attempts to draw one depend on too many arbitrary features like hardness of crust, percentage of metals, etc. Nobody wants to use size alone because there are really big moons and asteroids also, and some feel that mass should be used instead of size.
So, let's start debating percentages. "It's 60% planet! No it's 35% planet, your fat mama is 60% planet!..."
Table-ized A.I.
From TFA:
"Pluto’s surface temperature is a chilly -380 degrees Fahrenheit. "
Can we use useful units please?
That's 44.2611 Kelvin.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
As I commented years ago, the worst problem with the current IAU definition of "planet" is a practical one: we can't practically use it for objects orbiting other stars.
We are too far away to observe small objects around other stars, and I think we will always be able to detect larger objects but not smaller ones in many faraway orbits. So when we detect an object in another galaxy with the mass of Jupiter, and it’s orbiting a star, is it a planet? Well, under this current definition we don’t know if it’s a planet or not. Why? Because we may not be able to know what else is there in orbit. And that is a real problem. I think it’s clear that we will always be able to observe some larger objects without being able to detect the presence of smaller ones. If we can’t use the obvious word, then the definition is useless - so we need a better definition instead.
I think a much better definition of "planet" is "orbits a star, enough mass to become round". Yes, that means that Ceres and some Kuiper Belt objects become planets. That's a GOOD thing. A lot of people don't know of Ceres, yet that one object has about 1/3 of the ENTIRE mass of the asteroid belt.
Of course, none of this affects reality; this is merely a definition war. But clear terminology is important in any science.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Climate change is settled science. The number of planets in our solar system is not. It once was.
[ ] a planet
[ ] a plutoid
[ ] a bitch
Say "what" one more goddamned time...
The practical problem is a difficulty of communication. The purpose of words is to help us communicate. If we have no word for a common idea we want to express, then we usually create a new word or phrase.
Let's say we observe an object, with mass less than a star, that is orbiting a star other than our Sun. What, exactly, do you call it? Under the IAU rules, you cannot call it a planet, because we generally cannot know if it has cleared its orbit. The standard solution in English is to call it a "planet". But if we call it a planet, then we should use the same definition everywhere.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
That seems a waste of Hubble's precious time. Why can't Earth-based telescopes do that? You don't really need resolution to find moving specs, just lots of light-gathering ability, which Earth scopes can do better than Hubble.
Typically a scope takes an image of the same area of the sky on different days, then a computer or human compare the two images for any changes. If anything is spotted different, then subsequent observations are done to narrow down the nature of the movement.
(Hubble could image a candidate once identified, but please not for the search phase.)
Table-ized A.I.
Will this affect your carbon footprint? How about your doctor's?
Can't wait for this. Whatever is there will be fascinating.
and then just moves the goalposts. You guys lost the argument on size and switched it up to weight. We see what you did thar.....
I can't believe it only takes just 8 years to reach Pluto from the Earth for a satellite that is absolutely incredible.
But the IAU definition of a "planet" excludes bodies around other stars explicitly: "'planet' is defined as a celestial body that is in orbit around the Sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium shape, and has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit."
Officially, large bodies orbiting other stars are referred to as "exoplanets," just as Pluto is still officially a "dwarf planet," so I don't really see how there is a problem of there not being a term to use.
Next, Pluto will be known as an "asteroid of size"