New Horizons Releases Results

hendric writes to mention New Horizons had a press conference yesterday for the preliminary results from their Jupiter flyby. Quite a few images are also available on their site, like Europa Rising."

Re:Disillusioned

[isaac]

I mean, what's the point of going into space if all it is is dust, rocks, and craters.

Don't forget gas! Gas and plasma and vacuum. Vanishingly little of space is actually dust, rocks, and craters, really.

But there's plenty of gas.

-Isaac

Re:All this effort to visit a non-planet.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

It may be a non-planet, but none of the Kuiper belt objects have been studied yet, and Pluto is a start.

I wish the astronomy groups would get their adjective usage right, or at least consistent. A dwarf planet is somehow not a planet, but a dwarf star is a star. Sol is a dwarf star, so does that make it not a star? That sort of dissonance makes calling Ceres a planet seem sensible in comparison. Anyway, I support the notion of not calling Pluto a planet, I'm just disappointed that they had to odd twisting of words to do it.

Re:Disillusioned

[Anonymous Coward]

Because nothing has been the way we thought it would be:
-Before we orbited the moon, everyone assumed the back would look like the front
-Before we sent a probe to Mars, nobody knew what to expect, anything a Martian civilization to... something like the Moon. Even now Mars has many aspects to it that deny simple explanation, things like what lies more than a few inches below its surface or why it has anomalous amounts of methane in its atmosphere
-Before we sent a probe to Jupiter, everyone assumed that the moons there would be cold, inanimate frozen rocks... rather than posessing the largest volcanoes and deepest oceans in the solar system
-Before we landed a probe on Titan, speculation was rife about what could be there, because you just couldn't tell. Now that have a vague idea, it's weirder than anybody guessed

If I can assure you one thing about Pluto, it will be that absolutely no one will have predicted what will be there correctly. And that's what makes it worth looking.

Re:Don't forget the gold

[Repton]

If we brought back a trillion bucks' worth of gold, would it still be worth that much?