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New Horizons Phones Home After Pluto Flyby -- Craft Healthy, Data Recorded
Tablizer was one of several readers to note that the New Horizons probe has completed its flyby of Pluto and radioed home to confirm that it went without incident. Mission Ops manager Alice Bowman said the spacecraft was healthy, full of data, and sharing telemetry. The images New Horizon collected haven't been downloaded yet, but NASA decided to tide us over by releasing this high-resolution view from the day before. It was taken when the probe was still 768,000 kilometers away with a resolution of 3.8km per pixel. (Closest approach was approximately 12,500km.) They also released an exaggerated-color image of Pluto and Charon which highlights the non-uniformity of both worlds.
Pictures from closest approach are not yet available. Expect another post late Wednesday or early Thursday with those images. The reason for this is that New Horizons can't take pictures and send them to us at the same time, so imaging activity is interspersed with downlinks to Earth to transmit data. Emily Lakdawalla has posted a downlink schedule. On Wednesday afternoon (ET), the probe will transmit three images of Pluto that were taken from 77,000km away, with a resolution of 0.4 km per pixel. They'll be the first three pieces of a mosaic of Pluto's surface, and the dwarf planet will fill all three frames. It will take a full 16 months for New Horizons to transmit all the data it collects. (Lakdawalla also added Pluto to a montage of the biggest non-planets in the solar system. New Horizon's measurements indicate Pluto is slightly larger than we thought. It's now considered the largest of the Kuiper Belt objects.)
Pictures from closest approach are not yet available. Expect another post late Wednesday or early Thursday with those images. The reason for this is that New Horizons can't take pictures and send them to us at the same time, so imaging activity is interspersed with downlinks to Earth to transmit data. Emily Lakdawalla has posted a downlink schedule. On Wednesday afternoon (ET), the probe will transmit three images of Pluto that were taken from 77,000km away, with a resolution of 0.4 km per pixel. They'll be the first three pieces of a mosaic of Pluto's surface, and the dwarf planet will fill all three frames. It will take a full 16 months for New Horizons to transmit all the data it collects. (Lakdawalla also added Pluto to a montage of the biggest non-planets in the solar system. New Horizon's measurements indicate Pluto is slightly larger than we thought. It's now considered the largest of the Kuiper Belt objects.)
lol, that surely won't wake up any old controversy :)
anyway, awesome to see images coming through
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
Still say they should have named Charon, Goofy.
You can bet that, after NASA recently cut out of a live broadcast of the earth from space when 3 UFOs suddenly appeared in the video, that this data will be thoroughly picked through to make sure that there are no more unwelcome photobombs in these pictures.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
And, because this is the Internet, I'm being sarcastic.
NASA's staff does amazing things and this is another one. Imagine what they could do with adequate funding, non-politicized leadership, and freedom from overwhelming bureaucracy. It's a huge credit to the staff that despite enormous obstacles they do a lot of great science.
I blame my 1200 Baud modem.
The first data download with pictures from the encounter (the "New York TImes" download) will start at 5:00 AM EDT Wednesday. Expect some in the morning, and a lot during the 3:00 PM EDT NASA Press Conference.
And, because this is the Internet, I'm being sarcastic.
And moving your decimal places to the left.
(Thank you frovingslosh for mentioning my mistake before I had time to comment myself). The dimensions I quoted are not km, but earth radii. That's what you get for copy/pasting from Wikipedia without even thinking (it should be obvious to anyone that Pluto is larger than a fraction of a km in diameter).
,
It's now considered the largest of the Kuiper Belt objects.
It already was considered that. Eris, the previous contender for largest dwarf planet, has not been considered a Kuiper Belt Object for a long time now, but a Scattered Disk Object.
The vehicles you refer to on Earth are autonomous, rather than being remotely piloted. Because of latency, all rovers on other planets have to be at least somewhat autonomous. Teleoperator control is only possible on the Moon, and barely.
Well, there's no getting Pluto back to it's old status, now that they spotted those Kuiper Belt Loops...
http://xkcd.com/1551/
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
There's no "redo" in this mission, and the probe could have encountered local particles where a sand-sized grain could have killed the probe during its dive past Pluto, perhaps part of a thin or ex-ring. There was a lot to be worried about during that "silent" main encounter.
It's kind of like sending your kid to college, but not hearing anything from or about him/her until her final report card comes in the mail.
Table-ized A.I.
(Thank you frovingslosh for mentioning my mistake before I had time to comment myself). The dimensions I quoted are not km, but earth radii. That's what you get for copy/pasting from Wikipedia without even thinking (it should be obvious to anyone that Pluto is larger than a fraction of a km in diameter).
To be fair, it looks a lot bigger when it's excited.
Judging from the photos it was Very Happy to see New Horizons...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Downlink speed is limited to 1 kbps (bits, not bytes). 2 kbps if they use a trick involving shutting down power to instruments to boost transmit power.
Reminds me of the early 1990s when JPEG images first started showing up. Full-color 640x480 GIF photo scans were a couple hundred kB and could take 10+ minutes to download over my 2400 baud modem. I was astounded that a 30-40 kB JPEG could look just as good to the eye. Course the JPEG took over half a minute to decode and display back then, but combined with download time it was still faster. (Yes computers and network speeds used to be that slow - it's why the early web made extensive use of thumbnail pics.)
There are two potential Kuiper-belt objects the probe could explore, based on remaining propellant. Both are rather small, though.
I've read the power system will hold out until about 2030, although some instruments may not function very well before that with lower power.
Table-ized A.I.
NASA usually has screw-ball acronyms for probe and instrument names. Does "New Horizons" have one?
Non-Earth-Wayward-Historical-Oort-Reaching-(and)-Identifying-Zenith-Oriented-NASA-System or the like? Give 5 pts. to the best guess...
(Mine probably won't pass, I know)
Table-ized A.I.
I love cool probe taking pictures of distant planets (or whatever pluto is called these days). But why are we doing this? Just because we can? For the pleasure of exploring? Or is the exploration of pluto key in understanding some phenomena?
I was alive in the Mariner days ('62) but too young to remember that series....
I remember Sputnik and having a hard time understanding how it stayed up there. I still haven't lost my sense of wonder at all of the marvelous things we've done, seen and learned in my lifetime.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Beats Comcast still.
Table-ized A.I.
I'd been waiting for this and following New Horizons so obviously it's great to see, but what slightly tainted the coverage for me was all the freaking USA flag-wavin'. Do you guys really always have to do that? Obama called it "American leadership". Look, I know it was launched and managed by NASA but it involved various non-US technology and experts, not to mention plenty of non-US interest (and non-interest from most US citizens who won't even have heard of New Horizons until yesterday).
I do think your nationalism ruins things a bit. At one point a NASA guy said it was "all about America" in a room full of US flags. Funny, I thought it was all about Pluto. Can't it just be a victory for human ingenuity and curiosity?
== Jez ==
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Â(it should be obvious to anyone that Pluto is larger than a fraction of a km in diameter).
Either way, that's a damn large dog.
They did name Charon, Doofus.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Thus, you are wrong. Planets (at least the above mentioned five) were discovered by about any culture we know of, and rightly assumed to be different from stars.
Goodness I'll never understand why in english all the first letter in an article title sentence are capitalized. I was reading the title and kept wondering why the heck Horizons new phones were "home" after the Pluto flyby.
N/T
strap giant rockets on pluto and smash it into Venus ala Planetary Annihilation.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
The spacecraft is powered by a radioisotope thermoelectic generator (RTG), but that's not a reactor. The power comes from heat produced by the decay of Plutonium, but there is no sustained nuclear chain reaction involved.
I don't remember pointing out the mistake. What are you talking about? Maybe you shouldn't have been posting at all?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Hence them being called something different to just "star", meaning they were assumed to be different from stars.
Did you mean to say Mars, rather than Earth?
Unless New Horizons is going to swing back around and come back to the center of the Solar System, NH is well beyond the asteroid belt and won't be able to take any pictures of it in the future.
than the fact that Richard Nixon is the only US President to have his name on the moon (inscribed on the plaques attached to the LM descent stages). No mention of the 3 preceding presidents who actually created NASA and started the push toward the moon. Just tricky Dick, who wasted no time in KILLING the Apollo program shortly thereafter.
On the bright side, those flags are surely bleached white and crumbled from all the UV radiation and thermal cycles they have seen over the last few decades. And the one left by Apollo 11 got knocked over when the LM lifted off....
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Size doesn't matter if it hasn't swept out its orbit. Pluto will never sweep out its orbit.
Lakdawalla also added Pluto to a montage of the biggest non-planets in the solar system.
Thus starts another round of the old "Is Pluto a real planet?" fiasco. ;-)
The pseudo-argument is really based on a poor understanding of basic English grammar. The word "dwarf" in the phrase "dwarf planet" is being used as an adjective modifying the noun "planet". A fellow at NASA (whose name I didn't catch) explained the fallacy of saying this means that Pluto isn't a real planet, by giving a few examples of the usage. Thus, we have several "dwarf apple trees" in our yard. Nobody who understand English would say that this means they're not real apple trees; they are real apple trees that bear real apples, but are much smaller (3-4m tall) than most (full-size) apple trees. Similarly, our sun is classified as a "dwarf star". This means that it's a real star that fuses H atoms and gives off light, but it's smaller than most of the stars you can see in the sky. This is a good thing, because a "full-size" star 140 million km from our planet would totally vaporize all our water, and would burn out in a few hundred million years, destroying our planet at the end of its life. If there are other intelligent critters on planets around other stars, those will also be multi-billion-years-old dwarf stars like ours (to within an order of magnitude). Most of the galaxy's stars are dwarf stars.
Readers can probably think of lots of other common uses of "dwarf" or "pygmy" to mean a small version of something. This isn't mysterious; it's standard English syntax. (We have a potted "dwarf jade plant". It's a real jade plant, but its parts only grow to about 1/3 the size of the equivalent "standard" jade plant. It's a very easy sort of bonsai to grow. But when we bring it inside for the winter, we have to protect it from our cockatiels, who find it tasty.)
Other astronomers have pointed out the major problem with the term "planet": It's far too inclusive. It includes object as varied as Mercury and Jupiter, so it's an almost useless classification term. The long-term sensible approach is to prepend various modifiers to say which of a list of classes a given planet is filed under. We have a few of them, like "gas giant", and the more recent "ice giant", of which our solar systems contains two each. The classification "dwarf" was added a few years ago for the tiny planets that can't hold an atmosphere. We still don't seem to have a standard classification for the 3 intermediate-size planets, Venus, Earth and Mars. We also haven't figure out good terminology for the similar objects (Titan, Triton, etc) that also have things like an atmosphere with weather, but which share an orbit with a planet in a larger class. Pluto is an interesting borderline case, because at the recent perihelion, it has had a very thin but significant atmosphere, which is now condensing out as the sun gets more distant.
In the long run, we really should have a reliable set of classes for the sort of astronomical object that's big enough to be (roughly) spherical but too small for fusion to happen in its core. We've found that there are lots more of them in our solar system than we thought, at least 6 with atmospheres denser with ours, and several with thinner atmospheres. Pretty soon, we'll be getting good data on similar objects orbiting other stars.
Calling all the round-but-not-stars objects "planet" is a useful term. But such a vague term really shouldn't ever be used without a prefix. Maybe the astronomical community should get a committee together to come up with a better list of planet classes than the current mess. And try to get the media and general public to use it correctly. ;-)
Or maybe they should just officially declare "planet" to be a non-technical term, with no precise astronomical definition. But then they'd have to come up with some new technical terms, so they probably won't do that.
In any case, saying a "dwarf planet" isn't a planet merely shows ignorance of basic English grammar. Some astronomers have pointed this out. We just need to get the word out to all the people who misunderstand it due to their poor command of the English language.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Funny, cause the US funds some of the LHC as well. There was no reason to duplicate the work anyways.
http://home.web.cern.ch/about/...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Bonus points if we knock it into the Sun and apply top-right English to make Pluto follow it.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
"It will take a full 16 months for New Horizons to transmit all the data it collects."
What, does NASA use Comcast?
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
No. It is much less painful. Hence the proliferation.
I mean in both places the parent cited.