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NASA Unveils Historic Pictures of Pluto
An anonymous reader writes: The New Horizons team held a press briefing today and released new data and high-resolution photographs of Pluto. Alan Stern, lead researcher of New Horizons said: "We now have an isolated, small planet that's showing activity after four and a half billion years. We've settled the fact that these very small planets can be active for a long time, and I think that's going to send a lot of geophysicists back to the drawing board."
Did he just say ... "planet"?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I TOLD you it was a planet. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The very first link goes to NASA.
TFS contains a link to tha NASA main page, and to a finished
live stream on an unrelated media site, now without content.
Way to go!
NASA press release, with picture.
[...] and I think that's going to send a lot of geophysicists back to the drawing board.
And they will love it, any (true) scientist like facts or even hints that question current theories.
I bet some of them started already with a huge grin on their face.
There are fewer illiterates than people who can't read.
It could be Charon is a relatively new part of Pluto's family, and before they both settled into the current tidal lock, tidal forces baked both, accounting for the newish (non-cratered) surface and mountains.
The other side of Pluto even appears to have an Io-style volcano. Unfortunately, I don't think that side was in range for close-ups.
Table-ized A.I.
The detailed image showing Pluto's mountains is, according to one of the NASA scientists, one the youngest looking bodies in the solar system. The surface features appear to be less than 100 million years old. Very strange. Are there even any viable theories on what is providing the energy to resurface such an old, far-out, isolated body? A major impact of some kind is the only thing I can think of. Pluto is too small for the heat to be internally generated, and there is no massive nearby body to cause tidal forces and the like.
Better known as 318230.
There's a photo on xkcd.
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Olkin said: This exceeds what we came for.
What exactly did we came for?
take me to a guardian article instead of NASA's image gallery? Oh that's right, the editors are here to collect a paycheck and maintain their morbid obesity by doing as little as possible.
People keep referring to a heart shaped image on the surface of Pluto but is looks like a dogs head, snout to the right and ear on the left. Very similar to this image.
The character
http://www.cliparthut.com/clip-arts/451/pluto-disney-451536.gif
The celestial body
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2015/07/15/pluto-flyby-images/assets/150713-pluto-before-flyby.jpg
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Well, Hydra could certainly use a little more jpeg.
The sun actually looks remarkably like a star from the surface of the Earth, too. And Venus looks oddly like a planet for some reason...
The sun isn't going to just look like any other star from the surface of Pluto. The sun is many, many, many times closer to Pluto than any other star. Since the amount of light that is cast on an object is exponential with regard to distance, that means that the sun is shining a ridiculous amount of light onto Pluto compared with any other star. I would even bet that the sun illuminates the surface of Pluto significantly more than every other star combined.
Or are those really not pictures in the conventional sense and radar images?
They are visible light pictures, taken with optical cameras using a variety of color filters to try and get a true representation. There might not be a ton of light reflecting off Pluto back to the camera (relative to Earth, anyway), but Pluto is by far the brightest thing around the spaceship. The cameras can probably soak up that light for minutes without getting over-exposed.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I was surprised at how low resolution the picture of Hydra was - like 10px by 5px. :-) Didn't they take any higher-res shots of it than that? You'd think they'd pick one of the higher res ones to send first if so.
== Jez ==
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Do realize that LORRI isn't just a camera, it's actually more of a telescope. And they can expose the images as long as they want, and even stack them if they want.
If you think it's hard to get pictures on the sunlit side, that's nothing - they actually plan to try to get pictures on the side *not* lit by the sun, just by the pathetically weak light reflected by Charon. Getting images on the lit side is easy, but the dark side is going to be very difficult, involving lots of stacking.
"You see, Government is a system that is based on weapons." -- Timster
Since the amount of light that is cast on an object is exponential with regard to distance
You mean inverse-square with respect to distance. The inverse-square law applies when the source is a point (or uniformly-luminous sphere that is far enough away.)
Pluto is about 40 AU away from the Sun, whereas the Earth is 1 AU away. That means sunlight on Pluto's surface is about 1/40^2 = 1/1600 as bright as on the Earth's surface. That's dim, but not hard to record with good optics, a sensitive detector, and enough exposure time.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
the amount of light that is cast on an object is exponential with regard to distance, that means that the sun is shining a ridiculous amount of light onto Pluto compared with any other star. I would even bet that the sun illuminates the surface of Pluto significantly more than every other star combined.
nitpicking: the amount of light is inversely proportional to the square of the distance.
Yes, probably most/almost all of the light reflected in the surface of Pluto into the camera comes from Sol.
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It's still really bright at Pluto. Sunny area would be around 60 lux, which is about 9 EV in photography exposure (ISO100 EV scale).
Think office interiors, art gallery, stage show, indoor sports, etc.
Not very dim at all.
The main imager (LORRI) is a 208mm diameter telescope with a 2630mm focal length, or f/12.6. The spider and secondary obscure 11% of the area, so that's equivalent to f/13.4 in terms of light gathering for photographic purposes. Exposure times are 50-200 ms, or 1/20 to 1/5 sec.
On Earth, the sunny 16 rule says on a sunny day the proper exposure at f/16 is when your shutter speed is 1/ISO. So f/16, 100 ISO, 1/100 sec. The atmosphere absorbs roughly half the sunlight, so in earth orbit that would become f/16, 100 ISO, and 1/200 sec.
Pluto is about 32.6 AU from from the sun right now, so the sun's brightness there is 1/32.6^2 = 1/1063 what it is at Earth.
Going from f/16 to f/13.4 gets you about 1.43x more light.
Increasing exposure time from 1/200 sec to 1/10 sec gets you 20x more light.
That leaves a deficit of 37.2x, which you can get by increasing CCD sensitivity to ISO to 3,720.
ISO 3200 was easily attainable by high-end consumer digital camera sensors 10 years ago, much less a commercial one specially designed for scientific purposes.
The mission was launched in 2006 (January 19, 2006, 19:00 UTC). At the time of the launch, Pluto was still classified as a planet.
It only became a non-planet according to the IAU, who didn't want to classify Charon as a planet, too, later in August 2006.
So they launched the spacecraft at a planet.
Disney is going to be really pissed. NASA didn't get permission from Disney to release any pictures of Pluto.
FWIW, here's more info about one of the main imaging cameras (LORRI).
Short story:1Kx1K** CCD sensor w/ 350 nm to 850 nm panchromatic sensor. To compensate for the low light levels, the primary mirror is 20.8cm in diameter, the field of view is only 0.29 and the integration times are pretty long (100-150ms or so).
AFAIK, the images they have posted so far are generally the CCD images only processed to remove CCD bias, read-out smearing, and fixed-pattern non-uniformity effects.
**The sensor also support a 2x2 pixel binning mode to reduce smear for really long exposure times or high sensitivity shots.
In terms of brightness these pictures of pluto are about as bright as some backyard telescope achievements. That's how we found it to begin with. When you have a camera you have the ability to control exposure duration, then it just becomes a waiting game while your sensor is counting photons. The longer you count photons for the brighter the image providing the noise level isn't creeping up.
It's very similar to the way people do 30+ hour photos of nebula and the like, it's able to resolve light that simply too faint for the naked eye.
Incidentally, 1/1063 the brightness would put the sun at about magnitude -19.2, or about 400x brighter than the full moon, 2.5 million times brighter than Venus at its brightest.
Never mind. It wasn't a long exposure.
. Short version: the Sun on Pluto is 250 times brighter than a full moon is on Earth.
thank you. since outdoorsy people know that it's perfectly feasable to get around in the light of the full moon, the sun on pluto should be enough for a pic.
I'm not sure about that being "really" bright, but point taken. It's within the operating range of a good smartphone camera.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
It's Pluto!
how do they know it didn't join in at a later time? it has a radically inclined orbit. that tells me right away that it wasn't formed in this plane.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
To get an idea of how bright the sun is at Pluto, try Pluto Time.
Sunlight is much weaker there than it is here on Earth, yet it isn't completely dark. In fact, for just a moment near dawn and dusk each day, the illumination on Earth matches that of noon on Pluto.
We call this Pluto Time. If you go outside at this time on a clear day, the world around you will be as bright as the surface of Pluto at noon