NASA Probe Reveals More Detail In Pluto's Complex Surface 66
astroengine writes: As NASA's New Horizons spacecraft careens through the solar system with Pluto in its cross-hairs, new detail in the dwarf planet's surface is popping into view at an ever increasing rate. Any images acquired from here on in are the most detailed images humanity has ever seen of Pluto and, a little over a month from its historic flyby, New Horizons is already giving us tantalizing glimpses of what appears to be a rich and complex little world. Take, for example, this most recent series of observations captured by the mission's Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), which were taken from May 29 to June 2. There appears to be large variations in surface albedo (reflectiveness), possibly indicating there are huge regions of varying composition.
frist planet (Score:5, Funny)
First "yes it's a planet" post.
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No, it's because when the Pluto probe engineer spends her dollar, it enters the economy at some relatively high level. When she buys a new Mac Pro and then the Apple Store pays rent in a freshly gentrified part of town, and then the real estate company pays its employees, who buy gas and pay bridge tolls while driving to the office, a lotof economic work is being done by that dollar.
Meanwhile, the welfare dollar buys groceries at a convenience store that hasn't been updated in forty years. It gets stuck up,
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Wow talking about buying into a fool's dilemma.
You can spend money on feeding those that can not feed themselves and explore the universe.
In fact I would say that a good society spends on both.
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No, it's because when the Pluto probe engineer spends her dollar,...
You describe the multiplier effect of money. Research has shown that the largest multiplier effect of different types of government spending comes from: food stamps. That money that gets spent at local stores, and on perishable goods that are harder to import is more likely to get spent on again within the country. Give more well off people money (e.g. through employment or tax breaks), and they are more likely to spend it on things like electronics, and some to most of that money goes overseas, and out
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Lister: "They're all the same, those blue and green planetoids. Blue, green and planetoidy! "
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Over the moon? (Score:1, Interesting)
What's clear to me, is we've not no idea how planets or moons are formed, and the standard model doesn't really cut the mustard, hence, why we're still exploring, and still surprised at every turn.
If Pluto had been whacked soo many tim
Re: Over the moon? (Score:2, Funny)
No. See: momentum, angular.
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That's funny, the last time I saw Guildor declare modern science to be ignorant (on the formation of accretion disks around black holes) it came to angular momentum as well...
Re: Over the moon? (Score:5, Interesting)
Did you even read that article you posted? In the third paragraph the author complains that pictures of black holes don't exist. Honestly think about that for a minute. Let's ignore the stupidity of imaging a black object against a black backdrop for a second (although it does remind me of a historic work of art done by one Bullwinkle Moose). You have a phenomenon that is so dense light cannot escape it's gravity well. How in the fuck, pray tell, is light supposed to reflect off of it for a picture? The "unidentified objects" that this quack so readily dismisses are examples of hawking radiation by the way. He then goes on into a rambling tirade about how establishing theory using an ideal model isn't 100% accurate, as if no one in the scientific community is aware of this fact. By the time I get to his division by zero argument, I just want to hit him. I want to find this guy and kick him in the shin. "Duh, you can't divide by zero", yeah and -1 doesn't have a square root either; that doesn't stop the equations from being right.
You post about how a decent physicist and mathematician would understand this stuff better then the guys who devote their lives to studying it and then you post an article by someone who's math ability is somewhere short of pre-algebra. Way to make an argument.
Re:Over the moon? (Score:4, Interesting)
I immediately noticed a crater at the south pole which NASA are going to be surprised about.
NASA would be surprised about it already by now, if it was anything to be surprised about. Which it probably isn't. These are heavily processed images, and what you think you're seeing (quite how you've decided you're qualified enough to declare it to be a crater with a raised centre is beyond me) could be anything.
What's clear to me, is I've not no idea how planets or moons are formed,
FTFY.
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The mission costs south of $50m per year for 15 years; for comparison, the US social security budget is on the order of $1t, or $1,000,000m. You lose more money for food, housing, and medical treatment due to rounding errors.
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No, they don't. [cdc.gov] (National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 63 No 7, November 6 2014).
Over half of Americans will not only collect SS, they will do so for longer than a decade.
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"We do these things, and the other things, not because they're easy, but because they're hard!"
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Why don't we do world peace?
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Busy with the other things.
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This guy named Hitler tried, but no one wanted his kind of peace. As long as people/countries get to make their own decisions, there will never be world peace. When I can force you to stop fighting your neighbor over the lawnmower, then there will be peace.
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Why don't we do world peace?
We do. It's all the malcontents out there that won't go with the program.
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That statement of Kennedy's sounds great at first, but it's so vacuous. You can use it to apply to any project whatsoever, no matter how ridiculous it is.
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What makes me laugh is the context of Kennedy's remark there - one of "the other things" is referring to a previous sentence in the speech where he's asking why Rice plays Texas in college football, knowing that they will be creamed every year.
Context:
There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
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Nah, that was lost but the Nibiruans will have more to hand over during Nibiru's next perihelion.
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https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
I'm not entirely sure of what the AC is speaking...
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Or, they could have greatly increased the mass of the probe to include reaction mass and a thruster to slow down and capture into orbit... but that would have then required a far bigger lifter to get it off Earth to begin with, etc.
Plus you're doing it all on automation because Pluto is ~5.4 light-hours away...
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Direct Image Link (Score:1)
http://static.ddmcdn.com/gif/blogs/dnews-files-2015-06-pluto-sharpens-670x440-150611-jpg.jpg
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I found this link to an even sharper image:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... [wikimedia.org]
Oh, God, not again! (Score:2)
As NASA's New Horizons spacecraft careens through the solar system [...]
If the spacecraft is careening though solar system, did the engineers mixed up their metric and standard formulas [wired.com] again?
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Technically, Mars Climate Observer wasn't lost due to a metric / imperical foulup. It was lost because someone didn't write down the units on a set of numbers, and someone else assumed (incorrectly) what the units were when they read the numbers. The spacecraft would've been lost just the same if the figures had been written in kilonewtons, and someone had else assumed they were newtons.
This was one of the most basic things drilled in
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I, for one... (Score:1)
Viewing tip (Score:4, Informative)