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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.
Here's a hint: no one's been there yet.
Animals in the Disney kingdom including Mickey, Donald, Goofy, Pete et-all are uplifted animals, but canines were resistant to the engineering protocols.
Pluto's breed appears to be almost completely immune to the uplift engineering (although he shows some signs of complex thought). Other canines like the marginally intelligent Goofy, and the devious, but short-sighted Pete show that the engineering has other flaws and or a slow mechanism for all canines, as these two specimens cannot be considered true type-1 beings in their current state. This can be further demonstrated by the inexplicable intelligence leap made in just one generation between Goofy and his son Max, the uplift process was certainly slower for canines than for other creatures, but it appears to be converging toward type-1.
A better understanding of the early formation of the Solar system perhaps? Or you know, instead of having someone hold your dick for you, you could take the initiative and learn about what they intend to learn yourself.
Instead you post on /. and expose what a fucking moron Luddite that you are.
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?
Well, it's a pretty cheap mission at $650 million over 15 years.
But the most exciting thing about the mission is the clues it gives to the early history of the solar system.
You're right: Europa and Io are very interesting places to visit, especially considering the possibility for life there, and no doubt those missions are being planned. But for now, we're a year out from Pluto and about to discover what we're yet to discover.
Perhaps because they already sent one probe to Jupiter, and another is en-route.
Pluto is already sad and dejected from being demoted from planetary status. Must you compound its misery by having all the probes crowd around the "popular" planets like paparazzi?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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?
Please return your 4-digit ID.
Well, it's a pretty cheap mission at $650 million over 15 years.
*siiiggghhhh*
It's so frustrating that I hear people bitch about costs like that (not talking about the parent, of course) and yet, are more than happy for the government to spend trillions and countless lives on idiotic wars - which end up causing even more hostilities in the future.
If we, the US of A, concentrated our money, brains, and gumption on science and space exploration, not only would we be reaping the benefits of that technology, but we wouldn't be paying for the bad karma from all the decades of sticking our noses in countries where we have no business being in - especailly militarily.
It's truly disgusting that as a people, we value violence, brute force, and military strength over knowledge and wisdom.
Since the 1960s with our space race (yeah, it was motivated by the Cold War) we have degraded into a bunch of bullying, ignorant assholes who are more concerned about gathering money and toys instead of knowledge and better ourselves and humanity.
What a pathetic country we have become.
I am rapidly approaching the age where that is disproven
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think this was a more time sensitive mission, because Pluto is moving farther from the sun and scientists warned (rightly or wrongly) that it was about to freeze, and they had a window to use a gravity assist from Jupiter to get the probe there much sooner, and there was also an earlier mission snowballed.
On the other hand, Io and Europa aren't going to be any different in 5 years than they would have been a few years ago when the probe would have reached those destinations, so those missions were not as high priority than the potential impact of Pluto's orbit that they weren't sure of when they green-lighted this mission 13 years ago.
Not snowballed, mothballed, egads.
Exploring Uranus would reveal it contains lots of methane gas.
Well if theories are correct, Pluto's moon is not actually a moon but instead is a Mass relay that is just encrusted in ice.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Damn budgetary constraints
Pete is a cat, not a dog. (He was originally a villain against Mickey Mouse.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
so they're getting there like.. *right now*? awesome.
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
You're not giving us enough credit. We pioneered the nuclear technology that enables these craft to run for decades, and we've been improving that tech ever since. For instance, New Horizons runs on a third of the plutonium of Cassini-Huygens. We got a jump-start in rocketry, yes. All great men stand on the shoulders of giants. Our advances in computing and nuclear power are themselves a giant the rest of the world's space programs may stand on.
There's actually an even dumber reason than that.
The RTG on New Horizons was a spare from Cassini. It was very much "use it or lose it" as finding more plutonium for a RTG is getting more difficult every day.
Among other things, Sky and Telescope says one thing they'll look for is if Pluto's atmosphere matches predictive models - it goes so far to and away from the Sun that it could be possible that the atmosphere undergoes collapse. And also, can evidence be found if Charon has under-ice water akin to Europa?
Finally, Pluto is just a flyby.... New Horizons also will try to study a Kuiper Belt Object, and I find it interesting the mission was launched without a target - their team is studying Hubble images.
Forgot about that, Due to its orbit its "summer" only occurs for a few decades every ~200 Years, the height of its "summer" (closest point to the sun) was in 1990. Observing it during winter is relatively easy, but observing it during summer is a little more time sensitive and you've got a long wait between opportunities.
I was fishing last week, and took some time to observe the fish behavior, as the water was especially clear and the ecosystem was especially healthy.
Something I noticed almost immediately was that the largest fish were swimming near the shore. I've seen this before, but in this case there were no small fry near the banks. It was only the large adults. Out toward the center of the lake was where you were seeing smaller fish rise to food on the surface. In the case of this small mountain lake, the prime locations for what these trout need (food and cover, mostly) happened to be near the banks while the less prime locations were out in the middle.
As they say, big fish eat small fish, and if those small fish want an opportunity to cruise a better location, they will have to fight for it.
The battle for food and shelter/protection is not something we only see in humans fighting wars. The vast majority of animal species on this planet spend the entire length of their lives in a constant battle for food and shelter.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
The bottom line is that we know far more about Uranus than Pluto. Even given the wealth of knowledge and enjoyment Uranus has given generations of scientists and philosophers, the decision was made to explore strange (no not new worlds, just strange.) I think in part this is due to the fact that Uranus is massive and gassy, but what do I know?
Silence is a state of mime.
I can't wait until Pluto is reclassified again, this time as a derelict alien spacecraft orbiting at the edge of our solar system.
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?
Because every time we go there, WE FIND OUT SOMETHING.
We find something we HAD NO IDEA was happening.
Look at Io for the first example from the voyager series.
And every time we go again, we bring commentators like you with us.
That part is predictable.
This time Europa was more expensive than our last look at pluto's atmosphere before it freezes, so.. pluto is is.
Well if theories are correct, Pluto's moon is not actually a moon
that's no moon...
"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.
... Wow, curiosity is really not your forte, is it? Yes, this is a direct ad hominem, but hey it's more justified than calling someone out on their penis (funny joke right there, btw, classy.).
"Because it's there and we haven't been/know close to nothing about it" is a _perfectly_ good answer. This is science we're talking about, and raw research and exploration don't need another reason.
50+ years of advancement in computing and the result is Windows 8.
Fuck.
Mastering the English language is fucking easy: all you have to do is to put an f* word in every fucking sentence.
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.
Scientists will never send probes to Uranus.
But the TSA will.
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)
Besides, we were warned Europa is off limits
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
[ ] a planet
[ ] a plutoid
[ ] a bitch
Say "what" one more goddamned time...
The first is more appropriate for Pluto's region.
Table-ized A.I.
There's actually an even dumber reason than that.
The RTG on New Horizons was a spare from Cassini. It was very much "use it or lose it" as finding more plutonium for a RTG is getting more difficult every day.
Oh c'mon, you're trying to tell me that *nobody* at NASA had the common sense to call a few Libyan nationalists and order some used pinball machine parts off of Amazon?
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)
... Wow, curiosity is really not your forte, is it?
"Because it's there and we haven't been/know close to nothing about it" is a _perfectly_ good answer. This is science we're talking about, and raw research and exploration don't need another reason.
I'm plenty curious, but won't be signing up for that first manned mission to the surface of the Sun -- we haven't been there either, the movie Sunshine not withstanding (and it didn't go too well for them anyway) :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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.
I dislike replying to an AC, but this sentiment is common enough that I will. Let's examine " You were nowhere before WW2" -- ever heard of Robert Goddard, the American who built and launched the first liquid fueled rocket in 1926? The German rocket programs were largely independent of Goddard's work but following is a quote by Wernher von Braun himself in 1963, "His rockets ... may have been rather crude by present-day standards, but they blazed the trail and incorporated many features used in our most modern rockets and space vehicles." And another quote from von Braun in the same Wikipedia bio of Goddard, "Goddard's experiments in liquid fuel saved us years of work, and enabled us to perfect the V-2 years before it would have been possible." I will not say that the US (and the Soviet Union) didn't get big advances from the German rocket program, but neither country was "nowhere before WW II." Check out Konstantin Tsiolkovsky on the Russian side.
mass can be thought of as a side effect of clearing one's orbit. There's lots of mass that pluto has not, and perhaps never will incorporate into itself.
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?
Please return your 4-digit ID.
Second the motion.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates