Pluto-Bound Spacecraft Ends Hibernation To Start Mission 77
An anonymous reader writes NASA's New Horizons spacecraft awoke from hibernation on Saturday and sent a radio confirmation that it had successfully turned itself back on one and a half hours later. The spacecraft has been traveling for nine years across the solar system towards its destination, Pluto. From the article: "In 2006, with New Horizons already on its way, Pluto was stripped of its title as the ninth planet in the solar system and became a dwarf planet, of which more than 1,000 have since been discovered in the Kuiper Belt. With New Horizons approaching Pluto's doorstep, scientists are eager for their first close-up look at this unexplored domain."
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That freeloader got what was coming to him.
Re:As far as I'm concerned, Pluto is still a plane (Score:5, Funny)
I am not a cartoon character.
- Pluto, ruler of the underworld
Re:As far as I'm concerned, Pluto is still a plane (Score:4, Funny)
How the mighty have fallen. First, a Roman god, 2000 years later, you live in a doghouse and take orders (confusingly) from *another dog* - and a dimwitted country hick dog, at that.
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Well, easy solution, we find two crappy-ass Kuiperbelt objects and name them Yahveh and Jesus.
A few months later there will surely be some silly Disney character (a roach or a siphilitic duck for instance) called Jesus and Yahveh and this will be the end of Christianity (and Islam as they have the same Yahveh guy as God).
Never fails!
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it might have originated in the Kuiper belt, but it isn't there any more.
It never left it, it is still there. It is practically the definition of the belt's location in some cases, with its orbit spanning 30-50 AU which is the definition of the Kuiper belt region to some authors.
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The new definition of a planet is very arbitrary:
A planet is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit
According to that definition, other stars cannot have planets, since they don't orbit around the Sun. What a blooper. Then again, considering how few astronomers actually voted for this resolution, who cares?
Also, when talking about "cle
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Also, when talking about "cleared the neighborhood around its orbit, just how clear is "clear"?
A Stern-Levison paramter over 1? Take your pick, as there are several parameters related to the amount of stuff a body shares it s orbit with or connected to ability to clear and dominate the orbit, and they all show a several order of magnitude jump between the dwarf planets and planets.
Here's what Stern now has to say about that [wikipedia.org]:
Stern, currently leading the NASA New Horizons mission to Pluto, disagrees with the reclassification of Pluto on the basis that—like Pluto—Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Neptune have not cleared their orbital neighbourhoods either. Earth co-orbits with 10,000 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), and Jupiter has 100,000 Trojan asteroids in its orbital path. "If Neptune had cleared its zone, Pluto wouldn't be there", he now says
Nice to know I don't live on a "real" planet according to tha IAU.
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Nice to know I don't live on a "real" planet according to tha IAU.
Well, if you want to be purposely dense and not pay attention to any actual numbers or details, don't be surprised if the world passes you by. The IAU and astronomers are quite aware that orbits are not perfect vacuums, that there is every thing from gas and dust to comets and rocks passing by. But if you look at some of the actual numbers referred to, you will see how insignificant they are.
If you add up all of those NEAs crossing Earth's orbit, they are less than one part per million, especially if yo
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Stern, currently leading the NASA New Horizons mission to Pluto, disagrees with the reclassification of Pluto on the basis that - like Pluto - Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Neptune have not cleared their orbital neighbourhoods either. Earth co-orbits with 10,000 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), and Jupiter has 100,000 Trojan asteroids in its orbital path. "If Neptune had cleared its zone, Pluto wouldn't be there", he now says.
So it's not just "because you continue to declare it so without actually giving much arguments that way doesn't make it so." You could have easily found this if you had first done a rudimentary search. It's the first result for "planet clearing the neighborhood."
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Sure, it might have originated in the Kuiper belt, but it isn't there any more.
That's not the point. The point is it has three moons of the same size as itself, and a lot of other debris. It's not dominating its environment.
You can choose: Either we have 8 planets, or you have to learn 19 names, and new ones every year or two. 9 is not an option anymore.
Anyways, I don't understand why "dwarf planet" was not made a subclass of "planets" along with "major planets" (where the others go). But no, it is "planets" and "minor planets", which are by definition not a "planet".
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Trying to convince people that Pluto isn't a planet is about as sensible as trying to convince people that a kilobyte isn't 1024 bytes. Deal with it, and come up with a different name for whatever wacky definitions you want to use in future.
Why is Pluto's status an issue? (Score:2)
Trying to convince people that Pluto isn't a planet is about as sensible as trying to convince people that a kilobyte isn't 1024 bytes. Deal with it, and come up with a different name for whatever wacky definitions you want to use in future.
Trying to convince people that Pluto isn't a planet is about as sensible as trying to convince people that a kilobyte isn't 1024 bytes. Deal with it, and come up with a different name for whatever wacky definitions you want to use in future.
For most people, it's not an issue at all. For the remainder, I'd imagine it still would not be an issue if the discoverer of Pluto had been anyone but an American. That's the sticky wicket if they were truly being honest. What we finally have, that's been long neglected is a concise definition of what a planet is, and Pluto doesn't fit the bill. Any redefinition of the word planet to include Pluto would mean having to include hundreds of other bodies and that would mean that the Solar System would ha
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> Anyways, I don't understand why "dwarf planet" was not made a subclass of "planets" along with "major planets" (where the others go). But no, it is "planets" and "minor planets", which are by definition not a "planet".
The purpose of technical terminology is to be as clear and efficient as possible. Imagine having to say 'major planet' every time you wanted to talk about Earth or Mars or Jupiter. "Earth is the third major planet from the Sun." It's tedious.
But in informal speech you can say that Pluto i
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And here I thought the purpose of "technical terminology" was to improve communications between experts within a field by assigning strict definitions to certain words. In the field of linguistics, this is called a "jargon", and can be used to refer to the trade talk of nuclear physicists or that of plumbers or carpenters, etc. Of course astronomers don't study linguistics so it is not surprising that they don't know this term.
Within their jargon, astronomers can mangle, mutilate, extend, or transmogrify w
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The purpose of technical terminology is to be as clear and efficient as possible. Imagine having to say 'major planet' every time you wanted to talk about Earth or Mars or Jupiter. "Earth is the third major planet from the Sun." It's tedious.
As far as I can tell, the solar system has two major planets[1], two medium planets[2], two minor planets[3], and various microplanets[4].
1: Jupiter, Saturn
2: Uranus, Neptune
3: Earth, Venus
4: Mars, Mercury, Ceres, Pluto/Charon, Eris etc.
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I really have problems with the "dominating its environment" rule in the IAU definition of a planet. Much more objective (and non-heliocentric criteria) should be used for defining a planet. Thank goodness the Kepler team has chosen explicitly to ignore the IAU rules when defining what is and is not a planet with their discoveries.
For myself, using a definition of a planet as something which forms a sphere due to gravitational influence and hydrostatic pressure is more than sufficient to define a planet.
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I really have problems with the "dominating its environment" rule in the IAU definition of a planet. Much more objective (and non-heliocentric criteria) should be used for defining a planet. Thank goodness the Kepler team has chosen explicitly to ignore the IAU rules when defining what is and is not a planet with their discoveries.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but Kepler folks have been following IAU rules with the designation of planets, they're not naming them.
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The Kepler folks have been calling them planets though, which is my point. As for naming the planets, it has been historically up to the discoverer to propose a name.... but they've discovered so many planets (in admittedly a team effort) that it is sort of pointless to bother trying to give them names at this point. Enough data is being obtained from the Kepler mission that it is possible for you to discover a planet yourself, and the team is even encouraging private individuals to try and do just that t
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We might look upon the Moon, then, as neither a true satellite of the Earth nor a captured one, but as a planet in its own right, moving about the Sun in careful step with the Earth. From within the Earth–Moon system, the simplest way of picturing the situation is to have the Moon revolve about the Earth; but if you were to draw a picture of the orbits of the Earth and Moon about the Sun exactly to scale, you would see that the Moon's orbit is everywhere concave toward the Sun. It is always "falling toward" the Sun. All the other satellites, without exception, "fall away" from the Sun through part of their orbits, caught as they are by the superior pull of their primary planets – but not the Moon.
— Isaac Asimov
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And I see no reason why objects that meet all the requirements of being a planet but happen to orbit some other star cannot be planets. Wow, astronomy has now gone all the way from a parochial Earth-centered view of the Universe, to a parochial Sol-centered view.
But I guess you've got to expect stupid results when astronomers with no training in linguistics, taxonomy, or any related field step way out of their area of expertise to dictate about stuff to the rest of us.
Stupid astronomers. What would Galile
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Thanks for bringing up SKOS [w3.org]. This kind of semantic thesaurus has become an increasingly important tool in researching the literature of any field. This is especially true when the researcher might be following citations that lead him/her outside their particular area of expertise or into a natural language where he/she is not fluent.
Of course if the thesaurus is wrong, then literature that might otherwise be very important to a research project might well be overlooked. So building taxonomies-- classificat
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Exactly. I'm sure that sooner or later the IAU will talk it over with the semanticists and fix the problems. I'm thinking it would be better if that would happen sooner rather than later. And I strongly believe that, committee inertia being what it is, poking at the problem will help it get addressed sooner.
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My own hypothesis is that Pluto was only ejected because it was discovered in Arizona.
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Sure, it might have originated in the Kuiper belt, but it isn't there any more. Besides, it's the first object to be named after a cartoon character, which kind of made it fun (and easy to remember) when we were kids.
Wasn't Uranus named after the judge in the Trial segment of The Wall? That was also technically a cartoon (as in animated), and Uranus was discovered long before Pluto...long before The Wall even, which makes the planet's naming even more remarkable.
A thousand KBOs discovered, not dwarf planets (Score:5, Informative)
The article confuses Kuiper Belt Objects (more than one thousand discovered), and dwarf planets. To quote Wikipedia: "The IAU recognizes five bodies as dwarf planets: Ceres, Pluto, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake".
2015 will be a great year for looking at two of these. As well as New Horizons, there is also the Dawn probe on its way to orbit Ceres.
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Not only that, but as the probe has approached, it discovered . . .
They're right. That's no planet . . . it's a fully armed battle station!
Get us out of here . . .
Unfortunately, the minimal fuel reserves are no match for a tractor beams, and our little friends are going to die . . .
hawk
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Two, but possibly three. To quote IAU a bit more:
"For now, Charon is considered just to be Pluto's satellite. The idea that Charon might qualify to be called a dwarf planet in its own right may be considered later. Charon may receive consideration because Pluto an
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Makemake?? This one was 3D printed?
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Makemake?? This one was 3D printed?
I thought it was a Hawaiian fish.
New photography? (Score:3)
Will this give us some higher resolution photos of the surface to ogle over? It is true that we have yet not had high resolution photography of pluto? What is currently known about Plutos composition and is this mission planned to refine knowledge on that?
Re:New photography? (Score:5, Informative)
From the Wikipedia timeline table [wikipedia.org]:
Feb 2015 -- Observations of Pluto begin
5 May 2015 -- Better than Hubble -- Images exceed best Hubble Space Telescope resolution.
14 Jul 2015 -- Flyby of Pluto, Charon, Hydra, Nix, Kerberos and Styx
Re:New photography? (Score:5, Informative)
Will this give us some higher resolution photos of the surface to ogle over?
That's the plan.
It is true that we have yet not had high resolution photography of pluto?
Yes.
What is currently known about Plutos composition and is this mission planned to refine knowledge on that?
We know the approximate sizes of Pluto and its moon Charon, their weights (somewhat more accurately, mostly thanks to the fact that Pluto has a heavy moon and Kepler has a third law - without the moon, we'd be screwed!), some surface spectra have been measured (methane, carbon monoxide, nitrogen), and we know that Pluto has a very thin atmosphere that's going to freeze very soon. That's about it...
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Which is why you can't calculate your weight on Sedna, something I desperately want to know.
Chronology from TFA (Score:3)
Rather than try to make sense of the broken English in TFS...
Here's the quote from TFA:
Doing the math, then, there was a two-hour delay between when New Horizons awoke and when it launched its first message. As opposed into traveling in the future by 1.5 hours.
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As well, it has not been in hibernation for 9 years as the summary may mislead, it wakes up (or is awake? not sure) for a total of ~50 days a year to do stuff.
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I presume the rest was a matter of taking time to get components up to their minimum operating temperature and booting. That would include the radio.
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The components were already at the minimum operating temperature. You can't just let everything cool to the background, then hope to heat it back up later. Something will likely break. There have been survival heaters and (in this case) thermal shunts from the RTG to keep it warm enough the entire time.
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As the AC said, there's a difference between minimum storage temperature and minimum operational temperature (both of which are above the equilibrium temperature of space.
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I gotta admit, that struck me. On the other hand, it's possible that the controllers received confirmation at 9:30pm CST.
Why is this still on the way? (Score:4, Funny)
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Hibernation (Score:5, Funny)
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft awoke from hibernation on Saturday
Apparently isn't a Linux-based system then...
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Not one with systemd, anyway.
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nor windows, as it would be stuck downloading all the updates and too busy to respond.
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Perhaps it is!
"and sent a radio confirmation that it had successfully turned itself back on one and a half hours later"
Now we know where that gap in time came from.
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No, nine years ago would have made it Windows Vista. The first three days of reboot would have been an unending display of malware screens claiming "This system has XXX viruses on it." and requesting that money be sent to various Nigerian princes. It would then have crashed installing the first Windows update, after which all subsequent updates would have failed with that mysterious "Windows Update error 0x80070002" red X fail.
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So we need to send another probe to press ctl-alt-del and boot into safe mode?
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But it is a PlayStation One system (well sort of). The main CPU used in this probe has the same CPU that the original Sony PlayStation uses... admittedly radiation hardened and with a custom operating system intended for spacecraft operations. It is amazing what these planetary scientists can do with such minimalistic computer systems.
That beats the Voyager 2 probe though, which may very well be one of the last operating (as intended) computer systems in the Solar System with core memory.
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What goes unappreciated is that the technology being sent into space is usually quite antiquated in comparison to what is currently being used in consumer electronics. Most people think of NASA as having bleeding edge equipment and using computers that is decades ahead of anything other folks are using in the computer industry, when in fact the opposite tends to be the case.
Mind you, there are legitimate reasons for using tried and true systems in spaceflight as opposed to cutting edge systems, especially
photos (Score:1)
can't wait to see what kind of photos (regular and color enhanced) that New Horizons will send back to NASA. Cool
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It's somewhat of an unfair definition, though, as it's much easier to dominate a narrow orbit. If Earth was out in the Kuiper Belt even it would struggle to remove all competing large bodies. And there's supergiants where you could put Earth even into the habitable zone and still not have it able to dominate its orbit. On the other hand, large asteroids that don't even have enough gravity to fully collapse into spheres (Vesta, Pallas, Hygiea, etc) could clean up in a close orbit to a low-mass brown dwarf.
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Astronomers are now adding more and more epicycles to the definition of "planet" as used in their jargon. That's stupid.
The Keplerian solution is apparently too simple to grasp: A planet is one the set of {Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune}. Everything else is not a planet. That is a reasonable and sufficient definition of "planet" in the current astronomical jargon.
Meanwhile, those who wish to communicate in English can talk about planets without bothering to be so specific. T
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The definitions do define the scope of research, especially research by persons in other fields who are visiting the astronomy silo but are not residents of it.
SKOS does not work well with murky or badly designed definitions or classification schemes. See comment #48550243 [slashdot.org].
Astronomy isn't just about stars and planets any more. At least, it shouldn't be, it should be part of the larger community of scientists and contributing its share to the common goal of greater understanding.
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Astronomers are now adding more and more epicycles to the definition of "planet" as used in their jargon. That's stupid.
The Keplerian solution is apparently too simple to grasp: A planet is one the set of {Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune}. Everything else is not a planet. That is a reasonable and sufficient definition of "planet" in the current astronomical jargon.
At least Astronomers are trying to come up with formal definitions of stars and their orbiting bodies. Just saying the following in this particular list are planets without asking "why" is no more different to saying that the Earth is in the centre of the Universe and all opposed to this are heretics.
Astronomers have been applying the Scientific Method to orbiting solar bodies for a few centuries now and have arrived at what we would call a reasonable agreement on the scientific definitions of what each t
NASA at its best (Score:2)
Pushing the limits of exploration. Also a great argument for having a focus and not trying to be all things to all people.
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Fortunately NASA is dominated by engineers who do not have to put up with stupid definitions developed by committees of astronomers. It takes persons with great vision to get hard data from Mars, Jupiter space, and soon Pluto. The vision of the International Astronomical Union is too microscopic to really be of much use.
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My concern is with researchers from other fields who have cause to visit the astronomy silo but do not live there. We are more than a century past the time when any field of science could define its terminology in isolation from the rest of the community of scholars. Astronomy needs to look at its short-sighted parochial practices and use a wide field of view more often.
See comment #48550243 [slashdot.org].