New Horizons Gets Closer to Pluto, But Mystery Spots Now Out of Sight 98
The L.A. Times reports that the strange spots spotted on the surface of Pluto by the New Horizons mission will be on the wrong side of the planet for the approaching fly-by that the craft will make of the smallest planet (or dwarf planet, depending) of our solar system. (The BBC makes a similar observation.) That doesn't mean that New Horizons' approach is anything short of "a spectacular event."
im not saying aliens..... (Score:4, Funny)
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It's a garbage pod.
Yuggoth? (Score:2)
Isn't Yuggoth [wikipedia.org] supposed to be Pluto?
That's where the Mi-go [wikipedia.org] are.
Nah - probably some primitive type of fungi.
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Yep. It's the Wormface base [wikipedia.org]
July 1? (Score:1)
No point linking to an article from July 1 now.
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why not now? back then, everyone was busy trying to blow their fingers off their hands.
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HA! Even less point in getting the latest from the original source [nasa.gov], right?
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Their timeline has some serious NaN math errors - I hope they're not NASA errors: "New Horizons is taking 2 images of Kerberos with LORRI from NaN km away."
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Heh, relax. It's been traveling for over nine years to get here, and it's going to take well over a year before we get the full data set [planetary.org] from the flyby a couple of days from now, as the transmission bitrate is ridiculously low from that distance. What's a week or two?
On September 14, New Horizons will begin downlinking a "browse" version of the entire Pluto data set, in which all images will be lossily compressed. It will take about 10 weeks to get that data set to the ground. There will be compression artifacts, but we'll see the entire data set. Then, around November 16, New Horizons will begin to downlink the entire science data set losslessly compressed. It will take a year to complete that process.
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It will take a year to complete that process.
They must have Comcast. I just hope to hell they don't need tech support.
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Now we know were the wires went when we paid them to roll out connectivity for rural people.
I know the feeling (Score:1)
Every time I go to the doctor with some strange spots, they mysteriously clear up.
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Just marry a doctor, problem solved.
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But I thought they disappeared when......nevermind.
Hope (Score:2)
If the probe finds a big enough body, like a burnt-out brown dwarf, can it make a U-turn and visit the other side of Pluto?
Then again, such a discovery would probably change the focus to the brown dwarf such that re-visiting Pluto would become a secondary goal.
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Do you have a related link or study on that?
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Any brown dwarf would be at least a few light years away (or we'd know about it), and at New Horizon's current speed of 52,000 mph it would take around 13 thousand years to travel 1 light year. New Horizon's power source is due to run out in 2030.
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I suppose anything big enough to have U-turn gravity that's within 200 years or so away probably would radiate enough to be detected by now. However, a cluster of smaller bodies may be able to do the job. Suppose we invent better detection technology and find such clusters.
I know, it's a long-shot. But just imagine a Beowulf cluster of...
Scientific explanation (Score:3, Funny)
Pluto's embarrassed by its age spots, and so is showing its good side to the probe.
Jupiter (Score:1)
As soon as I saw the Picture of the spots, it reminded me of when Jupiter got hit by Shoemaker-Levy.
It's the simplest explanation in my opinion.
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Like Saturn or Mars? (Score:1)
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As soon as I saw the Picture of the spots, it reminded me of when Jupiter got hit by Shoemaker-Levy.
When I read "a remarkably bright expanse of terrain shaped like a heart." I though thank a deity it's not a face this time.
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Next contestant COME ON DOWN!!!!
Non-Hyphenated Title (Score:2)
How'ed ya do it Timothy??
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The dark areas are alien letters, it says "Welcome to the Solar System".
I want to know if the fine print says "Except Europa. Attempt no landing there".
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or, "Warning, there be humans about! They taste terrible."
Inserting into orbit would have been interesting (Score:1)
I imagine that would have complicated things a lot on its design phase, but now we'll have to wait more than a decade to do it, if it ever comes to pass
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Well, yes, everyone knows that would be awesome.
Some rough numbers I did indicate that to stop New Horizons (It is only 400kg) at pluto would take a Delta V heavy. That is - around 500 tons.
A launch campaign to launch 500 tons to pluto is likely to need several thousand rockets.
Stopping is hard.
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One of the researchers who posted on the Unmanned Spaceflight forum wrote about his efforts to design a miniprobe to decelerate at Pluto - if I remember right, 20kg - using atmospheric drag. But the calculations showed it would have to be made of something with a density like that of carbon aerogel (even silicon aerogel would be too much), making deployment of the deceleraiton system unrealistic, and undergo huge G-loads. He also added that people always suggest inflatable decelerators, but the problem wit
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To use aerobraking as a technique, you have to know detail about the composition and extent of the body's atmosphere. Now that it has taken New Horizons to find this out, we can design an aerobraking orbiter.
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Not really, as winter is coming to Pluto and the atmosphere will freeze.
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Even Pluto can't escape George R R Martin Memes....
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I never said that
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The problem is that you pretty much can't pick another.
The trajectory chosen was to reduce mission time.
If you have 9 years, then pretty much the only way you can do a pluto probe is blasting past at >10km/s.
If you try to make the trajectory more gentle, then yes, you can do this - a hohmann transfer - but this will take literally a hundred years. There is nothing close to pluto that can slow you down meaningfully at all with a gravitational assist.
Nuclear powered ion engines, nuclear rockets (dusty fiss
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It is not in principle insane.
The atmosphere contains a large amount of very light gas, and plutos mass is low.
This means that the atmosphere is quite 'puffed up' - meaning you can skim the planet and get quite a decent brake.
The required large aerosurface due to the low density makes it 'interesting'.
It requires detailed knowledge of the atmosphere.
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I suppose you can create a trajectory that will end up catching up to Pluto's orbit and position, but that would take decades or even a century.
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So it's a Toyota probe?
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I agree. It's like putting the ring down and turning around to go home just before you get to Mordor.
Pluto temperature. (Score:2)
Pluto is -233 degrees Celsius right? Therefore if there was an alien civilization living on the surface, they would need to use materials that could withstand the awesome cold there. If we went there would a spacesuit not freeze solid and shatter like glass? What materials could stay in one piece in this cold? I think that an alien with Helium II blood could live there, but what could sustain it?
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Maybe we'll find Outsiders.
Let's hope we can pony up the price for a hyperdrive shunt.
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What would their rate of metabolism be? Even if they were "technologically advanced" a billion years ago, would they be moving fast enough to notice what's been happening in the last 100 years on Earth?
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Pluto is -233 degrees Celsius right? Therefore if there was an alien civilization living on the surface, they would need to use materials that could withstand the awesome cold there. If we went there would a spacesuit not freeze solid and shatter like glass? What materials could stay in one piece in this cold? I think that an alien with Helium II blood could live there, but what could sustain it?
Or they could light a fire and roast marshmallows around the forge. Seriously, lifeforms might exist at such cold temperatures, but a race of ice giants belongs to myth. Thinking beings require warmth and calories to burn.
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Robert Forward wrote a science fiction book describing such a world with alien life:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Meanwhile.... (Score:4, Funny)
A fraction of a percent of the AMA has, out of concern of students having to learn so many bones, voted to declare that there are only 8 bones in the human body, and all of the others are dwarf bones, and that those don't really count as bones. And to tell the difference between a bone and a dwarf bone you have to do a detailed study using a definition that nobody can agree on. But, if you move a bone from one part of the body to the other, it can change between being a bone and not being a bone. Also, other mammals don't have bones at all - their bodies are held together by "something" that isn't defined at all.
Only a tiny fraction of those present at the AMA vote were in a field doing anything with anatomy; the rests were bacteriologists. But nonetheless, despite the criticism by anatomists, the AMA has adamantly refused to revisit their decision.
Re:Meanwhile.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Pluto as a planet doesn't really make much sense, without including others.
Eris, for example. While currently three times the distance of pluto from the sun, at times (next ~2800AD) it is actually closer than pluto to the sun, as well as more massive.
There is no real inarguable set.
Re:Meanwhile.... (Score:5, Funny)
... without including others
Exactly. They should be included, obviously.
The concept of a planet is pretty intuitive - it orbits a star and its big enough that its gravity has pulled it into a sphere. That's what pretty much everyone on Earth outside of the IAU understands a planet to be. The concept that you have to try to pretend that diversity doesn't exist in order to shrink down the list to a number whose names schoolchildren can memorize is a horribly unscientific approach.
We need to accept the universe that nature has created for us. There are terrestrial planets. There are gas giants. Ice giants. Eccentric giants. Hot jupiters. Super-earths. Water worlds. And yes, dwarf planets. They're all planets by pretty much any reasonable definition. In fact, they're a lot more similar to terrestrial planets than gas giants are.
We should be thrilled by the number of worlds in our solar system instead of intimidated by it and trying to write them out by a ridiculous definition that leads to absurd consequences. And uses nomenclature ("dwarf") that even the IAU itself doesn't use elsewhere (do they plan to declare "dwarf stars" to not be stars?). An "adjective-noun" is also a member of the group "noun" in any realistic nomenclature.
Extrasolar planets aren't planets according to the IAU either. You could have an exact replica of Earth orbiting an exact replica of the sun with an exact replica of Earth's "neighborhood" and it'd still not be called a planet. And even if they didn't arbitrary exclude them, we'd have no way to be able to determine if any of them had "cleared their neighborhood" without sending a probe there - aka, effectively impossible at this point in time. Not that "cleared the neighborhood" makes any sense, there's lots of objects in Earth's neighborhood, and new ones keep entering our neighborhood. And many of the planets don't appear to have formed in their current neighborhood anyway. Plus, Neptune has freaking Pluto in its neighborhood. And since when does what something "is" have anything to do with where it happens to be currently located? Would it make any sense for a cow be declared a "dwarf cow" and not really a cow if it was exactly the same but in a location that had several cowlike animal species near it? Would it make sense to make a definition of a "dwarf river", with the only rationale being to limit the total number of rivers in the world to 8?
I can just imagine an IAU-inspired Star Trek:
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"has cleared"
This is at best debatable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Makes the case that saturn and jupiter cleared earths orbit of 'hot jupiters' as they migrated in, causing collisional cascades and the remnants of those condensed into the terrestrial planets.
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Except that the planets haven't, according to current research, always been where they are, so it's not accurate to say that a particular planet "cleared" its own neighborhood. Jupiter cleared most planets' neighborhoods. And anyway a "cleared" measure is largely just a measure of distance from the star rather than a measure of any planet's properties.
Concerning extrasolar "planets" (which the IAU says aren't really planets): The "cleared the neighborhood" claim isn't about being merely "outweighed". Eris
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You know what I meant. There is no single object larger than Ceres, or even close to its size, in its neighborhood. Hence saying "If any exoplanets were outweighed by something else in the same orbit, we would have detected that other thing first". There is no "other thing" larger than Ceres in its orbit.
Neither "being dominant in its neighborhood" (which, by the way, Ceres is - its neighborhood isn't clear but it certainly is dominant), nor "being responsible for being dominant in its neighborhood" are rea
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"If any exoplanets were outweighed by something else in the same orbit, we would have detected that other thing first"
This is not correct in many cases.
For example, for Kepler - planets are found by looking at the dimming star as the planet comes in front of the sun.
If Kepler detects a planet, it is entirely insensitive to small objects in the same orbit, even if there are a _LOT_ of them.
It is also insensitive to objects outside the plane of the system (apart from timing transit variation for really large
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Splitters and Lumpers. A very old argument.
Nature cares not a fig for our 'definitions'. It just is.
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Seriously, the best argument they've given, and I'm not kidding, is that they don't want there to have to be hundreds of planets for people to memorize. One IAU official arguing for the current definition said something along the lines of (I could dig up the exact quote) "There's no way my daughter is going to be able to learn the names of all of the dwarf planets in school."
It's so ridiculously unscientific. And not only was it only a tiny fraction of the IAU who voted, but the vast majority of them were
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Now that isn't too hard to remember. But if we're going off planetary scientists, why not include satellites like Titan, which is a captured dwarf planet? Does a planet stop being a planet when it's captured by another?
And what about our own moon? It's far larger than the dwa
Re:A rose by any other name (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do you feel that you have to memorize them all? Do you feel compelled to memorize all of Earth's rivers or all of the named stars in our galaxy? The concept that "what I can remember all the names of" is grounds for a scientific classification is an absurdity.
And New Horizons' Alan Stern recommends - and I agree - that indeed moons that would otherwise meet the definition of being a planet except that they are moons of a planet should be seen as planetary moons. So our solar system could be said have several "planetary moons" and "dwarf planetary moons" - Earth's, the Galilean moons, Titan, Triton, maybe others. "Planet" being the general category for non-stars in hydrostatic equilibrium, "planetary" being the adjective form, "moon" being a body in orbit around something that's not a star, "dwarf planet" just being a category of planet, etc. They're all just different categorizations that you can apply where they're needed. Other systems might have other types of planetary moons, even gas giant moons.
Likewise, you should be able to have planetary bodies that aren't in orbit around anything and drift freely through space. We don't have the technology to spot them yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if the galaxy was chock full of them - why shouldn't it be? What an object orbits around doesn't define what it is. So you could have roaming terrestrial planets, roaming gas giants, roaming dwarf planets, and on and on.
Nature always likes giving us diversity. In almost every field of science, this diversity is embraced. Except apparently when it comes to the IAU and planets, on the grounds that "I couldn't memorize them all". Well, tough luck, we're going to keep finding more and more planets under any definition, and more and more diversity, with time, you can't hold out on your "I can't memorize them all" nonsense forever.
And really, why not embrace the fact that these aren't just undifferentiated hunks of rocks? Something being large enough to reaching hydrostatic equilibrium says a lot about the object. It means you start getting all sorts of geological differentiation processes, uneven heating, localized mineralization, long timeperiods to cool down, etc. It makes them very interesting places for exploration - and for the search of for life.
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which is a captured dwarf planet? Does a planet stop being a planet when it's captured by another?
Yes it does, that is actually a no brainer and has nothing to do with the question if the `object at first was a planet, a dwarf planet or a trans neptunial object or an asteroid.
Orbit the sun: might be a (insert adjective) planet, orbit something else: we call it a mooooooon
Every child knows that. No idea why people in this story now question what a moon is.