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Pluto-Bound Spacecraft Ends Hibernation To Start Mission
An anonymous reader writes NASA's New Horizons spacecraft awoke from hibernation on Saturday and sent a radio confirmation that it had successfully turned itself back on one and a half hours later. The spacecraft has been traveling for nine years across the solar system towards its destination, Pluto. From the article: "In 2006, with New Horizons already on its way, Pluto was stripped of its title as the ninth planet in the solar system and became a dwarf planet, of which more than 1,000 have since been discovered in the Kuiper Belt. With New Horizons approaching Pluto's doorstep, scientists are eager for their first close-up look at this unexplored domain."
The article confuses Kuiper Belt Objects (more than one thousand discovered), and dwarf planets. To quote Wikipedia: "The IAU recognizes five bodies as dwarf planets: Ceres, Pluto, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake".
2015 will be a great year for looking at two of these. As well as New Horizons, there is also the Dawn probe on its way to orbit Ceres.
Will this give us some higher resolution photos of the surface to ogle over? It is true that we have yet not had high resolution photography of pluto? What is currently known about Plutos composition and is this mission planned to refine knowledge on that?
Rather than try to make sense of the broken English in TFS...
Here's the quote from TFA:
Doing the math, then, there was a two-hour delay between when New Horizons awoke and when it launched its first message. As opposed into traveling in the future by 1.5 hours.
I am not a cartoon character.
- Pluto, ruler of the underworld
When Pluto got demoted, I thought they were supposed to send a self-destruct signal to the probe.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft awoke from hibernation on Saturday
Apparently isn't a Linux-based system then...
it might have originated in the Kuiper belt, but it isn't there any more.
It never left it, it is still there. It is practically the definition of the belt's location in some cases, with its orbit spanning 30-50 AU which is the definition of the Kuiper belt region to some authors.
Sure, it might have originated in the Kuiper belt, but it isn't there any more.
That's not the point. The point is it has three moons of the same size as itself, and a lot of other debris. It's not dominating its environment.
You can choose: Either we have 8 planets, or you have to learn 19 names, and new ones every year or two. 9 is not an option anymore.
Anyways, I don't understand why "dwarf planet" was not made a subclass of "planets" along with "major planets" (where the others go). But no, it is "planets" and "minor planets", which are by definition not a "planet".
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
How the mighty have fallen. First, a Roman god, 2000 years later, you live in a doghouse and take orders (confusingly) from *another dog* - and a dimwitted country hick dog, at that.
Trying to convince people that Pluto isn't a planet is about as sensible as trying to convince people that a kilobyte isn't 1024 bytes. Deal with it, and come up with a different name for whatever wacky definitions you want to use in future.
I really have problems with the "dominating its environment" rule in the IAU definition of a planet. Much more objective (and non-heliocentric criteria) should be used for defining a planet. Thank goodness the Kepler team has chosen explicitly to ignore the IAU rules when defining what is and is not a planet with their discoveries.
For myself, using a definition of a planet as something which forms a sphere due to gravitational influence and hydrostatic pressure is more than sufficient to define a planet. For that matter, I would even go so far as to suggest a "terrestrial" planet (aka something "Earth-like") as having an atmosphere above 1 millibar on its surface but less than 10% of its mass as the atmosphere would be plenty sufficient. And yes, that would include Titan as a terrestrial planet. I don't even mind that the Earth's Moon should be classified as a dwarf planet either.
And fortunately, it is more like about a thousand names of planets if you include the planets of other star systems that have been legitimately identified with specific orbital parameters and size characteristics. We are indeed living in exciting times and an era of massive discovery, where the definition of a planet should reflect that scope of potential candidates for what is a planet.