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New Horizons Captures First Color Image of Pluto and Charon
192_kbps writes: NASA published today the first color image of Pluto and Charon captured by the New Horizons probe, revealing a reddish world. "The fastest spacecraft ever launched, New Horizons has traveled a longer time and farther away - more than nine years and three billion miles - than any space mission in history to reach its primary target. Its flyby of Pluto and its system of at least five moons on July 14 will complete the initial reconnaissance of the classical solar system. This mission also opens the door to an entirely new "third" zone of mysterious small planets and planetary building blocks in the Kuiper Belt, a large area with numerous objects beyond Neptune's orbit." The picture is blurry, but far better than the few pixels Hubble can resolve, the image whets the appetite for New Horizon's closest approach on July 14th."
the photo is simply too blurry to be useful (to the avg person)
What use does the average person have for any photo of outer space objects? If its simply to whet the appetite for better cooler stuff to come then its done its job for you right? Me personally I always had an image of pluto being bluish gray from some artists conception I saw when i was 5 or so. To find out it may be red just blew my mind! (sorta) I'd say that was useful to me...of course it didn't make me any money so perhaps you're right after all.
That the photograph is color, able to distinguish the different shades of Pluto and Charon, is _wonderful_ and an exciting hint of more data to come. I'm delighted by the new theories that Pluto may have a subterranean ocean, much like Europa, in recent science essays I've read. The idea that a planet as remote and as poor in solar energy as Pluto could host life in such an ocean is even more amazing, and this new probe could reveal the pre-requisites for life as we know it to exist even on Pluto.
It's wonderful to live in times with such evolution of science and knowledge. I must applaud NASA for realizing that this mission was worth the time and effort and funding to launch it.
What would keep an ocean on Pluto from freezing? On the icy moons of gas giants, there are tidal forces, but what is there to warm Pluto?
How could all the experts have gotten it wrong all these years?
Calm down. Maybe it was taken at sunset.
Awww, dwarf planets are sooo cute!
Table-ized A.I.
If you do an image search, nearly half of the artist renderings still depict Pluto as blue-grey in color. I think the reasoning was that the planet was thought to be largely covered in methane ice, which has that color. And they were right about the ice, but UV radiation can initiate reactions in methane and diatomic nitrogen to produce a mix of simple hydrocarbons and nitriles, similar to the orange-brown haze that shrouds Titan, just on a much less dramatic scale.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
Since Pluto-Charon is essentially a double planet, I'd expect the tidal forces to be significant. Of course nothing with keep anything from freezing on the surface, just deep inside.
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It might be an ocean of liquid hydrogen. Hydrogen freezes at about -430F (around -260 C for foreigners), which sounds like it could be about in the ballpark.
If they knew the exact position, then just send the raw pixels for just the target area rather than an entire camera image. I'd guess the two bodies take up only about 25 x 25 pixels for that image. But I don't know the details of their compression and processing. I've read elsewhere that Pluto is roughly 5 pixels across at this time.
An interesting side fact is that they'll take a few good pre-encounter images and it will be the last images sent for roughly a month because the probe is not designed to transmit while aiming its instruments (to save money; contrast with Voyagers).
It will record everything during the fly-by for later playback. But, if it smashes into something orbiting near Pluto, the pre-encounter set may be the last images we get. Being it has at least 5 moons, there may be related debris orbiting.
Table-ized A.I.
Every depiction I've seen of it indicates blue. How could all the experts have gotten it wrong all these years?
Doppler shift. All the jokes about it's manhood, if it is or isn't a planet, got it down spectrum.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Memory lost at NASA? How about you read the end of that sentence that you carefully pasted into your post.
"....to reach its primary target."
All the other probes primary targets were the gas giants.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
What use does the average person have forÂanyÂphoto of outer space objects?
Are you joking? NASA probably creates more desktop background images for our computers than any other single entity. ;)
People around here seem to vastly overstate the physical significance of being a "double planet." You could just plug in known values into the equation for tidal acceleration: 2*G*(radius of body)*(mass of other body)/(distance between bodies)^3. You'll get that the tidal acceleration on Pluto is about ten times that of the Moon on Earth, but about one 200th of that of Jupiter on Ganymede, or one 2000th of that of Jupiter on Io.
It only indirectly cares about the relative size of the bodies, from the radius of the target which would be the one-third power of the target mass if assuming some density. What matters most is the distance between the bodies, due to that cube, and in case of Jupiter, that the mass is just so much larger. If you stuck Charon at the same orbital distance from the Earth, the Earth would experience more tidal forces due to its size even though the moon would be much smaller (with a barycenter just 4 km from Earth's center).
This goes doubly so if you are trying to use the crummy barycenter definition of a double planet, as you could move the Moon further from the Earth until the Earth-Moon barycenter is above the surface of the Earth, while at the same time decreasing the tidal forces.
Voyager has most of its instruments, including the cameras, on a movable platform. This allowed the positioning of the spacecraft and its high-gain antenna (the dish) to be decoupled from the positioning of the sensors. That made it very versatile and capable but, as you mentioned, more expensive. It also increases technical risk. What if the scanning platform jams up? (Some instruments could end up forever pointed back at the spacecraft! There are only so many multi-spectral selfies you would ever want to have.)
New Horzions is, for all intents and purposes, a single solid body. For 98% of its operational life, it's spin stabilized with its dish pointed squarely back towards Earth. That won't suffice for the intensive observations it was built for, so it will stop spinning and tilt itself this way and that to point its sensors at Pluto during its close encounter. Of course, when it is tilting this way and that, it is no longer pointing its main dish at Earth, so there can't be substantial communications. There is still the low-gain antenna, which is much less directional, which will allow for continuous commanding and telemetry, but has too little bandwidth for much science data to be beamed back. (more info here)
Rosetta travelled 10 years to reach its primary target, comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko.
(but you are right, I missed the end of the sentence)
Is it red, though?
Besides, I'm pretty sure it's white and gold.
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
What use does the average person have for any photo of outer space objects?
What use does the average person have for photos of their trip to the Grand Canyon? For that matter, what use does the average person have for any space exploration (as distinct from the more practical application of communication satellites)?
Humans interact with our world in a very vision-centric manner. It "means" more to us to see cool high-res color photos of some distant astronomical object than "knowing" the far more useful data about the makeup of its atmosphere.
And like it or not, that mean NASA gets more funding for cool pictures than for doing hard science. People care far, far more about the Mars rovers because they empathize with those plucky little robots still carrying on despite adversity (and sending back pictures to prove it), than because they fulfilled their primary mission objectives.
Tidal dissipation occurs when the tidal forces vary with time, generally due to the orbit of the secondary being eccentric. That brings it alternately closer to and farther from the primary, stretching and squeezing the interior.
However, the orbit of Charon about Pluto is circular (Buie et al., 2012), so the tidal bulge is constant. There's no time-varying deformation and no dissipation.
If God is a "Her" how did Mary get pregnant with Jesus?