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New Horizons Gets Closer to Pluto, But Mystery Spots Now Out of Sight
The L.A. Times reports that the strange spots spotted on the surface of Pluto by the New Horizons mission will be on the wrong side of the planet for the approaching fly-by that the craft will make of the smallest planet (or dwarf planet, depending) of our solar system. (The BBC makes a similar observation.) That doesn't mean that New Horizons' approach is anything short of "a spectacular event."
but aliens!
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Just marry a doctor, problem solved.
Table-ized A.I.
If the probe finds a big enough body, like a burnt-out brown dwarf, can it make a U-turn and visit the other side of Pluto?
Then again, such a discovery would probably change the focus to the brown dwarf such that re-visiting Pluto would become a secondary goal.
Table-ized A.I.
Pluto's embarrassed by its age spots, and so is showing its good side to the probe.
Table-ized A.I.
As soon as I saw the Picture of the spots, it reminded me of when Jupiter got hit by Shoemaker-Levy.
It's the simplest explanation in my opinion.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
why not now? back then, everyone was busy trying to blow their fingers off their hands.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
HA! Even less point in getting the latest from the original source, right?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
How'ed ya do it Timothy??
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Especially when JPL has photos available from yesterday morning.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Replying to myself - it's Johns Hopkins, not JPL.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Isn't Yuggoth supposed to be Pluto?
That's where the Mi-go are.
Nah - probably some primitive type of fungi.
Heh, relax. It's been traveling for over nine years to get here, and it's going to take well over a year before we get the full data set from the flyby a couple of days from now, as the transmission bitrate is ridiculously low from that distance. What's a week or two?
On September 14, New Horizons will begin downlinking a "browse" version of the entire Pluto data set, in which all images will be lossily compressed. It will take about 10 weeks to get that data set to the ground. There will be compression artifacts, but we'll see the entire data set. Then, around November 16, New Horizons will begin to downlink the entire science data set losslessly compressed. It will take a year to complete that process.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
The dark areas are alien letters, it says "Welcome to the Solar System".
I want to know if the fine print says "Except Europa. Attempt no landing there".
the more we learn about pluto, the more I think the probe sould have had a detachable orbiter to be left around it
I imagine that would have complicated things a lot on its design phase, but now we'll have to wait more than a decade to do it, if it ever comes to pass
Well, yes, everyone knows that would be awesome.
Some rough numbers I did indicate that to stop New Horizons (It is only 400kg) at pluto would take a Delta V heavy. That is - around 500 tons.
A launch campaign to launch 500 tons to pluto is likely to need several thousand rockets.
Stopping is hard.
Pluto is -233 degrees Celsius right? Therefore if there was an alien civilization living on the surface, they would need to use materials that could withstand the awesome cold there. If we went there would a spacesuit not freeze solid and shatter like glass? What materials could stay in one piece in this cold? I think that an alien with Helium II blood could live there, but what could sustain it?
liberare massarum ex ignorantia, clausa descendit molestie.
One of the researchers who posted on the Unmanned Spaceflight forum wrote about his efforts to design a miniprobe to decelerate at Pluto - if I remember right, 20kg - using atmospheric drag. But the calculations showed it would have to be made of something with a density like that of carbon aerogel (even silicon aerogel would be too much), making deployment of the deceleraiton system unrealistic, and undergo huge G-loads. He also added that people always suggest inflatable decelerators, but the problem with them is that they begin vibrating and rip themselves apart.
I have my own crazy ideas for deceleration involving magnetic and/or RF traps to hold fine ionized (or superconducting) dusts or ions in place around a craft (thus removing all issues of deployment difficulty and structural strength from the equation and allowing for a ridiculously thin layer). No, I haven't yet done any simulations to know whether the mass of such a system works out better than that of a typical drag chute.
The human body can be drained of blood in 8.6 seconds given adequate vacuuming systems.
A fraction of a percent of the AMA has, out of concern of students having to learn so many bones, voted to declare that there are only 8 bones in the human body, and all of the others are dwarf bones, and that those don't really count as bones. And to tell the difference between a bone and a dwarf bone you have to do a detailed study using a definition that nobody can agree on. But, if you move a bone from one part of the body to the other, it can change between being a bone and not being a bone. Also, other mammals don't have bones at all - their bodies are held together by "something" that isn't defined at all.
Only a tiny fraction of those present at the AMA vote were in a field doing anything with anatomy; the rests were bacteriologists. But nonetheless, despite the criticism by anatomists, the AMA has adamantly refused to revisit their decision.
The human body can be drained of blood in 8.6 seconds given adequate vacuuming systems.
of course trying to make it with new horizon's current trajectory would probably be impossible
I never said that
The problem is that you pretty much can't pick another.
The trajectory chosen was to reduce mission time.
If you have 9 years, then pretty much the only way you can do a pluto probe is blasting past at >10km/s.
If you try to make the trajectory more gentle, then yes, you can do this - a hohmann transfer - but this will take literally a hundred years. There is nothing close to pluto that can slow you down meaningfully at all with a gravitational assist.
Nuclear powered ion engines, nuclear rockets (dusty fission rocket), and aerobraking are all in principle possible, but they all have their own risks.
I suppose you can create a trajectory that will end up catching up to Pluto's orbit and position, but that would take decades or even a century.
To use aerobraking as a technique, you have to know detail about the composition and extent of the body's atmosphere. Now that it has taken New Horizons to find this out, we can design an aerobraking orbiter.
I agree. It's like putting the ring down and turning around to go home just before you get to Mordor.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Seriously, the best argument they've given, and I'm not kidding, is that they don't want there to have to be hundreds of planets for people to memorize. One IAU official arguing for the current definition said something along the lines of (I could dig up the exact quote) "There's no way my daughter is going to be able to learn the names of all of the dwarf planets in school."
It's so ridiculously unscientific. And not only was it only a tiny fraction of the IAU who voted, but the vast majority of them were astronomers, not planetary scientists. This isn't a decision arrived at by the people who study planets.
The human body can be drained of blood in 8.6 seconds given adequate vacuuming systems.
It will take a year to complete that process.
They must have Comcast. I just hope to hell they don't need tech support.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It could be an optical illusion like the Face on Mars or it could be like Saturn's hexagonal storms.
Now that isn't too hard to remember. But if we're going off planetary scientists, why not include satellites like Titan, which is a captured dwarf planet? Does a planet stop being a planet when it's captured by another?
And what about our own moon? It's far larger than the dwarf planets. It seems to have a similar internal composition to a planet. If earth had disappeared, it would orbit the sun.
What I'm getting at is that classifications are arbitrary. The dwarf planet/planet split is not a horrible division when it comes to classification.
Now we know were the wires went when we paid them to roll out connectivity for rural people.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Not really, as winter is coming to Pluto and the atmosphere will freeze.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Why do you feel that you have to memorize them all? Do you feel compelled to memorize all of Earth's rivers or all of the named stars in our galaxy? The concept that "what I can remember all the names of" is grounds for a scientific classification is an absurdity.
And New Horizons' Alan Stern recommends - and I agree - that indeed moons that would otherwise meet the definition of being a planet except that they are moons of a planet should be seen as planetary moons. So our solar system could be said have several "planetary moons" and "dwarf planetary moons" - Earth's, the Galilean moons, Titan, Triton, maybe others. "Planet" being the general category for non-stars in hydrostatic equilibrium, "planetary" being the adjective form, "moon" being a body in orbit around something that's not a star, "dwarf planet" just being a category of planet, etc. They're all just different categorizations that you can apply where they're needed. Other systems might have other types of planetary moons, even gas giant moons.
Likewise, you should be able to have planetary bodies that aren't in orbit around anything and drift freely through space. We don't have the technology to spot them yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if the galaxy was chock full of them - why shouldn't it be? What an object orbits around doesn't define what it is. So you could have roaming terrestrial planets, roaming gas giants, roaming dwarf planets, and on and on.
Nature always likes giving us diversity. In almost every field of science, this diversity is embraced. Except apparently when it comes to the IAU and planets, on the grounds that "I couldn't memorize them all". Well, tough luck, we're going to keep finding more and more planets under any definition, and more and more diversity, with time, you can't hold out on your "I can't memorize them all" nonsense forever.
And really, why not embrace the fact that these aren't just undifferentiated hunks of rocks? Something being large enough to reaching hydrostatic equilibrium says a lot about the object. It means you start getting all sorts of geological differentiation processes, uneven heating, localized mineralization, long timeperiods to cool down, etc. It makes them very interesting places for exploration - and for the search of for life.
The human body can be drained of blood in 8.6 seconds given adequate vacuuming systems.
ohhhh sorry that is incorrect. the correct answer is "what about mickey mouse"
Next contestant COME ON DOWN!!!!
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
which is a captured dwarf planet? Does a planet stop being a planet when it's captured by another?
Yes it does, that is actually a no brainer and has nothing to do with the question if the `object at first was a planet, a dwarf planet or a trans neptunial object or an asteroid.
Orbit the sun: might be a (insert adjective) planet, orbit something else: we call it a mooooooon
Every child knows that. No idea why people in this story now question what a moon is.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
or, "Warning, there be humans about! They taste terrible."
Table-ized A.I.
Because at the time, the NASA site didn't have the latest photos, and the Johns Hopkins site did.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
So it's a Toyota probe?
Table-ized A.I.
But I thought they disappeared when......nevermind.
Table-ized A.I.
Their timeline has some serious NaN math errors - I hope they're not NASA errors: "New Horizons is taking 2 images of Kerberos with LORRI from NaN km away."
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
It is not in principle insane.
The atmosphere contains a large amount of very light gas, and plutos mass is low.
This means that the atmosphere is quite 'puffed up' - meaning you can skim the planet and get quite a decent brake.
The required large aerosurface due to the low density makes it 'interesting'.
It requires detailed knowledge of the atmosphere.
Even Pluto can't escape George R R Martin Memes....
Get a life, not a lifestyle. - Hikem Bey