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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Besides, we were warned Europa is off limits
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
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.