Pluto Probe Snaps Jupiter Pictures 133
sighted writes "The New Horizons probe, on its way to Pluto and beyond, is now speeding toward Jupiter. Today the team released some of the early data and pictures, which are the first close-range shots of the giant planet since the robotic Cassini spacecraft passed that way in 2001."
This just in... (Score:4, Funny)
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How long does this take? (Score:2)
Re:How long does this take? (Score:5, Informative)
well this is where they are (Score:5, Informative)
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi [nasa.gov]
so using Sol as Origin [0,0,0], with distance in km and km/s velocity measures:
XYZ position and velocity in Km and Km/sec
V prefix = velocity,
Jupiter
A.D. 2007-Jan-19 00:00:00.0000 (CT)
X =-3.523007925524937E+08 Y =-7.203651223053448E+08 Z = 1.087397270750013E+07
VX= 1.158611696091788E+01 VY=-5.127849980674650E+00 VZ=-2.378734986696975E-01
Earth
A.D. 2007-Jan-19 00:00:00.0000 (CT)
X =-7.005151113800500E+07 Y = 1.294518808525130E+08 Z =-1.647040773451328E+03
VX=-2.669513206382950E+01 VY=-1.429493892074527E+01 VZ=-5.052885705412180E-04
And the Horizons probe itself is here:
A.D. 2007-Jan-19 00:00:00.0000 (CT)
X =-3.141011231236297E+08 Y =-6.673772181265557E+08 Z = 9.200702373118341E+06
VX= 1.154291925552546E-01 VY=-1.978644188955009E+01 VZ= 1.493924692614632E-01
However it's too early to work out the times taken for signals to travel based on these positions. I need more coffee.
Re:well this is where they are (Score:5, Informative)
That is, the distance between Earth and Jupiter right now is: 8.95528824E8 km.
Dividing that by c gives 2987 seconds. So, right now the half-ping is 50 minutes.
By similar calculation, you can get that EarthNew Horizons is 2779.975 s =~ 46 minutes.
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"if the speed of light is ever found to be anything other than infinite then it may be said that I know nothing in matters of philosophy"
So all those who quote his "Cogito ergo sum" should think again!
pretty tough for this early ... (Score:1)
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i do actually know the TECHNICAL answer: one digit, followed by a bunch of decimal places followed by an exponent is standard scientific notation. Still looks bizzarro to me though
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It definatelly helps when it comes to Phobos and Deimos, they are a pain to get right.
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It means you can see at a glance how big it is, without having to count the digits.
I'm more curious that they think they can measure Jupiter's position to a fraction of a millimetre, or the velocities to a fraction of a nanometre per second...
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Cranky
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Because extra digits do not equal accuracy.
To put it another way, those numbers are nothing more than visual noise. If you can measure something to only four decimal places, it makes absolutely no sense to use any numbers after the fourth decimal place, as they don't represent anything _at all_.
The real world is not like a high-school math class. You don't get any "attaboys" for meaningless ext
Re:well this is where they are (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:well this is where they are (Score:4, Funny)
I just think the 16 decimal places are kind of overkill because, by the time you write them down, everything after the fifth or sixth one has changed because the objects are moving relative to each other.
Re:well this is where they are (Score:5, Informative)
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/mission/whereis_nh.php [jhuapl.edu]
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LOL couldn't resist
(oh and btw the captcha for this post just happens to be "immature"... go figure!!!)
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Re:How long does this take? (Score:5, Informative)
Cassini runs at 82kbit/second from Saturn, but it's a probe with a larger power budget.
The imager takes one-megapixel, 16bpp images, and compresses them to 100kbyte files for initial transmission, saving the originals in a few gigabytes of onboard flash; it can be instructed to send back uncompressed images if there's something interesting visible.
So an image takes about 20 seconds to transmit, plus about six minutes if you want the uncompressed version; and it takes 45 minutes to get to Earth from Jupiter. From Pluto, the images will take half an hour for the preview and twelve hours for the uncompressed image.
Re:How long does this take? (Score:5, Funny)
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I nearly soiled myself on that one.
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New Horizons has a total of 8 GB of redundant solid state (flash) memory to save data as it's taken. Divide that by the the 450 baud the parent mentioned, and you can see that to broadcast all of that data to earth would take about 7 months, not including overhead related to operating the probe and previewing the most important data.
In fact, New Horizons will perform it's observations of Pluto and Charon nearly
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Note that many of the images will be stored onboard and sent after the main encounters are done. This is because it uses up time and fuel to aim the probe back and forth between antenna alignment with earth and science instruments.
To cut costs, New Horizons rotates the whole probe to aim instruments instead of having movable instruments (unlike Voyagers, which had movable
Did anyone remember to tell the probe... (Score:5, Funny)
I certainly hope so, otherwise it could get really embarrassed when it tries to ask for directions!!
All these planets are yours (Score:3, Funny)
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Forget... (Score:1)
heh (Score:3, Funny)
Doctor Manhatten Outraged!
probe (Score:1, Funny)
Thankyou, thankyou. I'll be here all week. Try the chopped liver.
4 billion kilometers... (Score:1)
New Horizons will be soon exactly 4,000,000,000,000 meters away from 134340 Pluto at 2007-01-19 18:49:08 UTC.
http://www.yaohua2000.org/cgi-bin/New%20Horizons.p l [yaohua2000.org]
Mac widget for tracking New Horizons: http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/status/ma gicnumber.html [apple.com]
APL??? (Score:3, Funny)
As a matter of scale... (Score:2)
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12-14,000 km high by 24-40,000 km wide.
Earth is about 12,750 km diameter.
So yeah, at it's fullest you could fit 3 wide, but only the center one would fit completely widthwise.
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I told you those corporate mergers would doom the Earth.
Just an Opinion... (Score:4, Interesting)
Hell, I know Pluto isn't considered a planet... but that to me makes NH even more exciting. Pluto is a large KBO (Kuiper Belt Object) and as such has the potential to be a very early remnant of the formation of our solar system. As such, investigating this object and Charon, it's "moon" has the potential to teach us far more about the early existence of the solar system than investigating many other objects. To be honest, I'm MORE excited about a trip to a relatively unknown and uncharted object such as a KBO than I would be over the exploration of another planet (despite the fact that these are arbitrary designations at best)
The NEAR mission was fascinating for the same reason. It was investigation of a relatively unknown object and we learned far more about the nature of asteroids and other deep space objects during that mission than we ever thought possible. If NH even returns half of the information about Pluto that NEAR returned about the asteroid Eros then we will learn an incredible amount about our solar system, and maybe change a few models about solar system formation that might just change some minds.
Good show, NASA. Sometimes you're the butt of a lot of jokes, but there are times you manage some truly remarkable missions (the mars rovers for one) that increase our understanding of the universe and just really excite science geeks like me
Moo (Score:1)
The linked picture is here [jhuapl.edu].
Just begging for the joke (Score:1)
"Pluto Probe Snaps Jupiter Pictures"
Well then they F***ed up.
Wha??? (Score:5, Funny)
Holy crap, they made another metric/imperial conversion error!
All that distance... (Score:3, Funny)
Damn! (Score:2)
Those Jovians sure are persistent.
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Thus it would take 10 years, not 4.
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On the contrary, Alpha Centauri A/B is 4.395 light-years away, plus or minus 0.007 light-years. Wikipedia is your friend!
Misinformative (Score:3, Informative)
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Imagine that there is a bomb in LA that just went off. Jack Bauer finds a way to make his PDA use quantum entanglement to tell this to Washington before they would be able to detect the event any other way. If some horrendous female
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Imagine that there is a bomb in LA that just went off. Jack Bauer finds a way to make his PDA use quantum entanglement to tell this to Washington before they would be able to detect the event any other way. If some horrendous female actor, err, computer analyst found a way to disarm the bomb before Washington would receive a signal traveling at c from LA and transmit the data back it could get there before either the bomb went off or Jack sent the first message.
No? When the bomb would have exploded and th
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How do you define present, or more to the point now or instantaneous? It may sound like a stupid question, but it's a tad tricky when you worry about relativity. I think that it is generally thought that something is happening now when light traveling from the event reaches the observer.
Which means that if you send information faster than the speed of light, that information gets there before the event actually ha
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I think that it is generally thought that something is happening now when light traveling from the event reaches the observer.
Now that's bullshit, when we look at galaxies 13 billion ly away we don't say that we see them as they are now but as they were 13 billion years ago.
That whole Jack Bauer example thing is like saying, "if person A farts, but that by some magic person B that stands 10 feet away instantly finds out that A has just farted while the smell hasn't reached his nose yet, and that by the sa
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I'm looking at my copy of A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. It seems that I've generally F'd up the simultaneity issue. But that isn't really the interesting portion. He does however equate faster than light travel with time travel. I'm going to quote a portion of chapter ten now.
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if you can travel faster than light, the theory of relativity implies you can also travel back in time
Sure, except that it doesn't apply to our case, since communication by quantum entanglement, if it was possible, would be instantaneous, not because it would go at an infinite speed, but because it would be instantaneous. In other words, it wouldn't go faster than light, it would only be instantaneous, and therefore it wouldn't go back in time.
Think about the game Nabercular Drop or Portal, when you go th
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If instantaneous is in fact faster t
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Would you consider instantaneous to be faster than, slower than, or equal to the speed of light?
Slower, much slower, like 0.00 meters/second actually. If it was possible to communicate using quantum entanglement, it would consist of rougly having a pair of photons in two distant places, and when the state of one would be changed the state of the other would instantaneously follow. So you see, there's really no speed involved there.
The whole point of relativity is that time isn't absolute - it is relative
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Your clock example is telling, you don't incorporate relativistic effects, which is necessary to understand how superluminal = timetravel.
Imagine we have three clocks and synchronize them. Clock A1 stays in LA, Clock A2 travels to DC, where it remains, and clock B is traveling so that
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God, you're so thick :-)
First of all, event 1 doesn't *happen* at 0.0238s to observed B, but it is *observed* at 0.0238s. Observer B would be stupid if he assumed that because he observed it at 0.0238s it means it happened at 0.0238s. And if someone at LA sent him a message at 0.0, and that he sent one back at 0.0, then yeah obviously it would all happen before observer B would *observe* the explosion, but it wouldn't happen before the explosion would actually happen.
Ok, if information travels from point A
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I'm guessing it is the one who has no understanding of relativity.
There is no preferred reference frame. If Observer A says event 1 and event 2 are simultaneous he's right. If observer B says event 2 happens before event 1 he is also right.
I'm done with this, if you wish to remain willfully ignorant you are free to do so - I'd ask that you not make yourself look like an idiot by spouting off horrible misrepresentations of physics, but I fear that is a lost cause. If you want to k
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I'm done with this, if you wish to remain willfully ignorant you are free to do so - I'd ask that you not make yourself look like an idiot by spouting off horrible misrepresentations of physics, but I fear that is a lost cause
That was uncalled for, but same to you.
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But apparently not! In order to actually make use of entanglement for communication, you need a conventional comm
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Whoa, I didn't know that these things made 0.1c
Wait
Re:Communication a problem (Score:5, Informative)
While that is in reality a major accomplishment in terms of having a human artifact leave the solar system, it is a far cry from being able to reach another star system, especially Alpha Centauri. Especially as Alpha Centauri is hardly in the plane of the ecliptic (where most of the planets are located at), requiring some very precise trajectory calculations that would have made the visit to the outer planets by Voyager too difficult to perform.
The primary mission of Voyager was to visit the gas giants of the Solar System, and it did that spectacularly. Anything else it has done or is doing now is incidental extra science, as we are now getting scientific measurements of the environment that is very far from the Earth.
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+2 Interesting!? Mod Parent Down (Score:5, Informative)
Voyager 1 will take on the order of several hundred thousand years to reach Alpha Centauri.
The traditional explanation for this is that the graviton can only travel at the speed of light and as such will take 10 minutes to travel from one particle to the other, so far so good.
The 'traditional' explanation? Gravitons are hypothetical at best, and currently mathematically useless. Quantized force mediators do not need to "intercept" a moving particle at a distance; they are virtual, and there are infinitely many of them in all directions.
By changing the mass of the ball (simple enough to do with a powerful laser)
This is all nonsense. Even if this were true, your probe is also receiving gravitons from every other atom in the universe. The effect of varying a "ball of mass" would not even be measurable. Just because a sizable block of text with "sciency words" is posted doesn't mean it's meaningful, and certainly doesn't deserve mod points. Please mod parent down, and please read things before giving points!
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Those measurements confirm general relativity, which as I point out, requires that gravity interacts at the speed of light. While my statements no doubt confirm the rumors that I revel in pedantry, I still must point out that no direct observation has confirmed that gravitation acts at the speed of light. I imagine this will change in the next decade or two, but until then, I'm smugly sitting back.
Also, it's pretty cool how we can cite directly online the papers in question (or at least papers that refer
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But I mostly agree with you, though I believe that it's very unlikely that gravitation will be propagating at more than 1c.
Er one thing (Score:1)
From Wiki, and I know I've read similar on NASA... (Score:2)
"Voyager 1 is not heading towards any particular star, but in 40,000 years it will be within 1.7 light years of the star AC+793888 in the Camelopardis constellation."
From http://www.daviddarling.info/ [daviddarling.info]
"An earlier planned route past Neptune would have resulted in the probe coming within 0.8 light-years of Sirius in just under 500,000 years from now - easily the closest and most interesting foreseeable stellar encounter of the four escaping probes. However, the Neptune
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Bullshit (Score:1)
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Let's strip you of your academic credentials along with a dude who proposed stripping of academic credentials from global warming sceptics
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Another dismissal for erroneous points (Score:2, Interesting)
You're still thinking in three spatial dimensions plus one of time. Start adding extra dimensions to Einstein's 4D & things aren't so ridiculous - extra dimensions will discount, not time itself but, the effect of time. Why do you think 10D & 11D Superstring/M theories have been postulated?
In this way the rule limiting the exchange of information is kept intact and
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As previously mentioned these gravitons will instantly arrive at our deep space probe regardless of how distant it actually is, but will not act on it until some time later. The key part is that we have a graviton detector on our probe which measures the number of gravitons received.
You can stop now. Interacting with a graviton detector is an "action". Ie, if we use your model of interaction, the gravitons show up "immediately" and then interact with the graviton detector some time later. BTW, "immediat
2009? (Score:2)
t takes 8 minutes to send a signal as far as mars and 4 years to send one to Alpha Centuri, which Voyager 1 is predicted to reach in later 2009.
If Voyager 1 is covering a million miles a day, that means an AU roughly every 90 days, a little less than 4 AU's a year. Being over 277,000 AU's to Alpha Centauri you'd be looking at close to 80,000 years. I'm too lazy to pull out a calculator and run the exact numbers.
Unless you physics experts invented some way to bend the time/space continuum or you've go
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Sorry, your imagination is not a lab.
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Momentum is forever. I think you're talking about "battery life".
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You're thinking of the Higgs boson. We are nowhere near approaching the level of technology required to detect gravitons, and the mathematics they give rise to doesn't even work. The only real reason we have to believe they exist is because the other forces also have quantized mediators.
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And all we found was that Martian microbe that smells like daffodils.