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NASA Probe Reveals More Detail In Pluto's Complex Surface
astroengine writes: As NASA's New Horizons spacecraft careens through the solar system with Pluto in its cross-hairs, new detail in the dwarf planet's surface is popping into view at an ever increasing rate. Any images acquired from here on in are the most detailed images humanity has ever seen of Pluto and, a little over a month from its historic flyby, New Horizons is already giving us tantalizing glimpses of what appears to be a rich and complex little world. Take, for example, this most recent series of observations captured by the mission's Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), which were taken from May 29 to June 2. There appears to be large variations in surface albedo (reflectiveness), possibly indicating there are huge regions of varying composition.
First "yes it's a planet" post.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I immediately noticed a crater at the south pole which NASA are going to be surprised about.
NASA would be surprised about it already by now, if it was anything to be surprised about. Which it probably isn't. These are heavily processed images, and what you think you're seeing (quite how you've decided you're qualified enough to declare it to be a crater with a raised centre is beyond me) could be anything.
What's clear to me, is I've not no idea how planets or moons are formed,
FTFY.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The mission costs south of $50m per year for 15 years; for comparison, the US social security budget is on the order of $1t, or $1,000,000m. You lose more money for food, housing, and medical treatment due to rounding errors.
Did you even read that article you posted? In the third paragraph the author complains that pictures of black holes don't exist. Honestly think about that for a minute. Let's ignore the stupidity of imaging a black object against a black backdrop for a second (although it does remind me of a historic work of art done by one Bullwinkle Moose). You have a phenomenon that is so dense light cannot escape it's gravity well. How in the fuck, pray tell, is light supposed to reflect off of it for a picture? The "unidentified objects" that this quack so readily dismisses are examples of hawking radiation by the way. He then goes on into a rambling tirade about how establishing theory using an ideal model isn't 100% accurate, as if no one in the scientific community is aware of this fact. By the time I get to his division by zero argument, I just want to hit him. I want to find this guy and kick him in the shin. "Duh, you can't divide by zero", yeah and -1 doesn't have a square root either; that doesn't stop the equations from being right.
You post about how a decent physicist and mathematician would understand this stuff better then the guys who devote their lives to studying it and then you post an article by someone who's math ability is somewhere short of pre-algebra. Way to make an argument.
If you turn javascript off on discovery.com (there are about 3 dozen(!) embedded sites; the list even scrolls off the NoScript screen), not only does the page load about 20 times faster, as a bonus you get the entire slideshow on one page and don't have to mindlessly click through one picture at at time.