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."

Comments

im not saying aliens.....

[ganjadude]

but aliens!

Re:im not saying aliens.....

[Chelloveck]

What do you think was up with that "safe mode" last week? They obviously saw something in the pics and they needed time photoshop it away and move the probe so the spots would be out of view in future pics. It's aliens, all right!

Hope

[Tablizer]

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.

Scientific explanation

[Tablizer]

Pluto's embarrassed by its age spots, and so is showing its good side to the probe.

Re:July 1?

[fustakrakich]

HA! Even less point in getting the latest from the original source, right?

Re:July 1?

[NormalVisual]

Especially when JPL has photos available from yesterday morning.

Re:July 1?

[Dutch Gun]

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.

Re:Inserting into orbit would have been interestin

[queazocotal]

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.

Meanwhile....

[Rei]

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.

Re:Meanwhile....

[queazocotal]

Pluto as a planet doesn't really make much sense, without including others.
Eris, for example. While currently three times the distance of pluto from the sun, at times (next ~2800AD) it is actually closer than pluto to the sun, as well as more massive.
There is no real inarguable set.

Re:Meanwhile....

[Rei]

... without including others

Exactly. They should be included, obviously.

The concept of a planet is pretty intuitive - it orbits a star and its big enough that its gravity has pulled it into a sphere. That's what pretty much everyone on Earth outside of the IAU understands a planet to be. The concept that you have to try to pretend that diversity doesn't exist in order to shrink down the list to a number whose names schoolchildren can memorize is a horribly unscientific approach.

We need to accept the universe that nature has created for us. There are terrestrial planets. There are gas giants. Ice giants. Eccentric giants. Hot jupiters. Super-earths. Water worlds. And yes, dwarf planets. They're all planets by pretty much any reasonable definition. In fact, they're a lot more similar to terrestrial planets than gas giants are.

We should be thrilled by the number of worlds in our solar system instead of intimidated by it and trying to write them out by a ridiculous definition that leads to absurd consequences. And uses nomenclature ("dwarf") that even the IAU itself doesn't use elsewhere (do they plan to declare "dwarf stars" to not be stars?). An "adjective-noun" is also a member of the group "noun" in any realistic nomenclature.

Extrasolar planets aren't planets according to the IAU either. You could have an exact replica of Earth orbiting an exact replica of the sun with an exact replica of Earth's "neighborhood" and it'd still not be called a planet. And even if they didn't arbitrary exclude them, we'd have no way to be able to determine if any of them had "cleared their neighborhood" without sending a probe there - aka, effectively impossible at this point in time. Not that "cleared the neighborhood" makes any sense, there's lots of objects in Earth's neighborhood, and new ones keep entering our neighborhood. And many of the planets don't appear to have formed in their current neighborhood anyway. Plus, Neptune has freaking Pluto in its neighborhood. And since when does what something "is" have anything to do with where it happens to be currently located? Would it make any sense for a cow be declared a "dwarf cow" and not really a cow if it was exactly the same but in a location that had several cowlike animal species near it? Would it make sense to make a definition of a "dwarf river", with the only rationale being to limit the total number of rivers in the world to 8?

I can just imagine an IAU-inspired Star Trek:

Kirk: "What is that planet on the viewscreen? Prepare a team to beam down to the surface."

Spock: "Actually, captain, we cannot be certain that it is a planet."

Kirk: "Spock, I can see it right there, it's a planet - it's a huge round thing orbiting its star."

Spock: "Yes, captain, but I have not yet completed my scan to see whether it has 'cleared its neighborhood'; I need to first find out if any asteroids that cross its orbit. The survey will take a few hours to complete."

Kirk: "But Spock... it's right there, it's a planet! It's even got oceans, an atmosphere, clouds - it's a veritable second Earth!"

Spock: "It could be a dwarf planet, which isn't really a planet, despite being having 'planet' in the title." (beat) "Captain, I have been reviewing the IAU's definition; because it's not orbiting the sun, it's not only not a planet, it's not anything at all."

Kirk: "Okay, okay - somebody prepare a team to beam down to the nothing-at-all that looks like a damned planet!"

Re:A rose by any other name

[dasunt]

• Mercury
• Venus
• Earth
• Mars
• Ceres
• Jupiter
• Saturn
• Uranus
• Neptune
• Pluton & Charon (double planet)
• Eris
• Haumea
• Makemake
• 2007 OR10
• Sedna
• Quaoar
• Orcus
• (307261) 2002 MS4
• 120347 Salacia
• Varuna
• Ixion
• Chaos
• Varda
• +dozens of unnamed more

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.

Re:A rose by any other name

[Rei]

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.

Re:A rose by any other name

[angel'o'sphere]

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.