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New Horizons Returns Best Images of Pluto's Moons Hydra and Nix
An anonymous reader writes: Over the weekend, the New Horizons probe sent back more data from Pluto, including two of the best images we'll get of its small moons Nix and Hydra. Nix measures about 42km long by 36km wide, and has a large reddish spot on it. The resolution allows us to see features about 3km across. Hydra is slightly bigger, and the pictures were taken with a different instrument, so resolution is a bit better. "Although the overall surface color of Nix is neutral grey in the image, the newfound region has a distinct red tint. Hints of a bull's-eye pattern lead scientists to speculate that the reddish region is a crater. ... Meanwhile, the sharpest image yet received from New Horizons of Pluto's satellite Hydra shows that its irregular shape resembles the state of Michigan. ...Although the overall surface color of Nix is neutral grey in the image, the newfound region has a distinct red tint. Hints of a bull's-eye pattern lead scientists to speculate that the reddish region is a crater." Images have been taken of Styx and Kerberos, the most recently discovered moons of Pluto, but they won't be transmitted back for a while, yet.
NASA has also released an image of a mountain range inside Pluto's heart-shaped region.
New Horizons is made up and all these images are fake. It's all made in a studio in Nevada. I know a guy who knows a guy who had a part in it.
and identifies as a planet.
If anyone is confused, Hydra is .81 Rhode Islands and Nix is .55 Rhode Islands.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
What the fuck has happened to Slashdot?
Here we have a great submission about a scientific topic that has been on the front page for some time.
But there are only 7 comments so far, not including this one.
Of those 7 comments, 5 of them [that's over 70% of them!] have been modded down to -1 already.
None of them are high quality comments, but none of them should be at -1, either.
They are actually about this topic, which is more than we can say about the remaining two comments.
One accuses Pluto of being a transsexual astral body, yet that comment is at +2.
The other is one of those pathetic "You are all cows. MOOOOOOO!" comments that we've seen so many of lately. It is at 0.
I suspect that it is one or more people working for Slashdot who go through and give the plain -1 downmods, with no indicator of why.
This happens in every topic.
Valuable comments end up at -1 right away.
Idiotic comments don't.
It is like the moderating system has been turned upside down, so that good comments get downmodded and bad comments stay the same or even get upmodded!
It was never like this before.
If a submission like this was posted even just a couple of years ago, there would be good discussion about it.
There would not have been this rabid and instantaneous downmodding of good comments.
I never had to browse at -1 just to read high quality comments that were incorrectly modded down!
What the fuck has happened to this site?
Why has this site fallen apart so fast?
It used to be a good site!
It used to be full of great discussion!
But now it is full of stupid comments about cows and transsexuals, with comments that are actually relevant getting modded down!
It is pathetic!
What the fuck has happened to this site?!
Troll... Actually it DOES provide jobs to people who would otherwise be unemployed, jobs for people who may have kids who need to see the doctor and go to school... But don't let the truth hit you in the a s s on the way out the door.
It's a giant ham floating in space!
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, haammmmmmm...
I can't proofread articles. I can't proofread articles.
The rate at which pictures are being released by the project are pathetic. I don't want to hear how low the data rate is from Pluto. Paranoid scientists are witholding dozens or hundreds of them to keep from being scoped. Spunik Planum is a glacier. Of what material, who knows? CO, N2, or some weird mixture. You can see that the region covers the darker terrain by the many embayment relationships at the meeting of terrains at its edge. The patterned ground is also a giveaway, but who can explain the large size of the patterns? What is the dark stuff? Organic gunk, not unlike light crude oil or LNG at fantastically low temperature. In processed approach images you can see the path that gas sublimating from the glacier takes as it sublimates and migrates to the pluto dark side from the sub solar latitude. It faintly stains the terrain. My guess is that glaciers like Sputnik Planum accumulate on the dark side during Pluto's pronounced winters, as the erode from the light side. They seem to be 100's of meters if not kilometers thick. The complex seasons produced by Pluto's elliptical orbit and high inclination surely disrupt the surface asymmetrically. Pluto is in southern summer and just passed perihelion. The south cap should be near its minimum extent. Pluto is a freaky place. Release more pictures greedy scientists!
an ill wind that blows no good
Seems like a hundred years from now when we're looking at the planets and moons in the Centauri system.
Hmm.. we have light sails and ion engines in the 20th century
How long until they start to speculate about Gravity Sails and Wind surfing the Ion clouds between stars?
They already know about the Higgs Boson and how to make a hoverboard.. what's taking so long
Combining multiple high res adjacent pictures here.
This is magnificent - I count at least ten different types of terrain in just this tiny part of Pluto. What a world.
And IMHO it looks even more like subglacial liquids at play now.
"You see, Government is a system that is based on weapons." -- Timster
So Hydra is broken into two parts? Or did the idiot author forget about Michigan's upper peninsula?
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Fuck off you off-topic partisan fool, nobody gives a shit about your opinion. Pub and Dem suck equally.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Comparing Volume to Area?
How far Slashdot has fallen!
If we pulled our skull out of our political fossil asses and used the brain power, we could have a warp drive in 10 years.
We know how the standard model behaves and close to knowing how the Higgs fields work, it's only the time it will take to realize how important it is.
So much is going on and what we see in the headlines is Trump making a complete ass of himself.