Message From Pluto

Dayton Kitchens · Jul 23, 2015

RickDeckard said: ↑

Let's hope that the funding isn't cut or anything and that it can continue exploring the Kuiper belt. It's not as if chances like that come around very often.

Also, in terms of probes, what's next? We've visited all of the major spots in the solar system to some extent by now. I hear that there's a mission planned for a sample return from an asteroid. Maybe the moons of Neptune or Uranus could do with a closer look, or we could send something to land on the Jupiter/Saturn moons?
Click to expand...

Well anything is possible, in the early 1980s, NASA during the Reagan administration actually gave some thought to cutting links to Voyager II BEFORE it got to Uranus (1986) and Neptune (1989).

But I doubt it would come to that for New Horizons.

IIRC Juno is supposed to reach Jupiter this year. There are other missions planned for Jupiter as well. And Mars gets its usual amount of attention.

Tuckerfan · Jul 24, 2015

An amazing view of Pluto.

Pluto by night.

Video of a flyover of the ice plains of Pluto.

Tuckerfan · Jul 25, 2015

If any of you still have your 1st gen. Sony Playstations, you might want to dust them off and play some games on them. It used the same processor as New Horizons does.

Dayton Kitchens · Jul 25, 2015

Tuckerfan said: ↑

If any of you still have your 1st gen. Sony Playstations, you might want to dust them off and play some games on them. It used the same processor as New Horizons does.
Click to expand...

I have a Gameboy?

Bickendan · Jul 25, 2015

Dayton3 said: ↑

Tuckerfan said: ↑

If any of you still have your 1st gen. Sony Playstations, you might want to dust them off and play some games on them. It used the same processor as New Horizons does.
Click to expand...

I have a Gameboy?
Click to expand...

Bickendan · Jul 25, 2015

Bickendan said: ↑

Dayton3 said: ↑

Tuckerfan said: ↑

If any of you still have your 1st gen. Sony Playstations, you might want to dust them off and play some games on them. It used the same processor as New Horizons does.
Click to expand...

I have a Gameboy?
Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Seriously though, as long as you have Zelda, your GameBoy's set

Dayton Kitchens · Jul 26, 2015

Bickendan said: ↑

Bickendan said: ↑

Dayton3 said: ↑

Tuckerfan said: ↑

If any of you still have your 1st gen. Sony Playstations, you might want to dust them off and play some games on them. It used the same processor as New Horizons does.
Click to expand...

I have a Gameboy?
Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Seriously though, as long as you have Zelda, your GameBoy's set
Click to expand...

I'm more partial to the TNG game, the TOS game, and Paper Boy.

Bickendan · Jul 26, 2015

Dayton3 said: ↑

Bickendan said: ↑

Bickendan said: ↑

Dayton3 said: ↑

I have a Gameboy?
Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Seriously though, as long as you have Zelda, your GameBoy's set
Click to expand...

I'm more partial to the TNG game, the TOS game, and Paper Boy.
Click to expand...

Paper Boy?!

gul · Jul 26, 2015

Paper Boy was a fun game, but I played the live action version.

Tuckerfan · Jul 26, 2015

About Pluto's red rains.

As New Horizons beamed back incredible images of Pluto and Charon over the last few weeks, many people learned for the first time that Pluto is red, and we discovered that Charon is strikingly red at the pole. The question “why is Pluto red” has been answered with a word that most people have never heard of, and perhaps even fewer people can actually define—“tholins”.

What in the world(s) are tholins? During the 1970s, Carl Sagan’s laboratory at Cornell was busily taking mixtures of cosmically relevant gases and irradiating them with various energy sources. They were searching for answers to questions ranging from “why is the Great Red Spot red” to “how did life on Earth originate” and in the process produced material for which there was no name. In 1979, Carl Sagan and Bishun Khare published an article titled “Tholins: organic chemistry of interstellar grains and gas” in the journal Nature and the word “tholin” was born.

For the past decade we have been producing in our laboratory a variety of complex organic solids from mixtures of the cosmically abundant gases CH4, C2H6, NH3, H2O, HCHO, and H2S. The product, synthesized by ultraviolet (UV) light or spark discharge, is a brown, sometimes sticky, residue, which has been called, because of its resistance to conventional analytical chemistry, “intractable polymer”. However, we have recently succeeded, through sequential and non-sequential pyrolysis followed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) in determining something of the composition of this material. It is clearly not a polymer—a repetition of the same monomeric unit—and some other term is needed. We have discussed this material as a constituent of the Earth’s primitive oceans and therefore as relevant to the origin of life; as a component of red aerosols in the atmospheres of the outer planets and Titan; as present in comets, carbonaceous chondrites, and pre-planetary solar nebulae; and as a major constituent of the interstellar medium, which is the concept discussed here. We propose, as a model-free descriptive term, ‘tholins’ (Gk ϴὸλος, muddy; but also ϴoλòς, vault or dome), although we were tempted by the phrase ‘star-tar’. The properties of tholins will depend on the energy source used and the initial abundances of precursors, but a general physical and chemical similarity among the various tholins is evident.
Click to expand...

Although informative, the definition given in the Nature article is not particularly easy to repeat when people ask, “what is tholin?” I have been studying tholin for almost a decade and in my experience the most frequently used synonyms for tholin are “gunk”, “brown gunk”, and “complex organic gunk”. Tholin is also often described as a “tar-like” substance. Words like tar, kerogen, bitumen, petroleum, asphalt, etc. all describe substances that are potentially similar to tholin in some ways. However, these materials all result from life; they are “biotic”.

Since 1979, the definition of tholin has expanded and now often includes organic solids produced from irradiation of cosmically abundant ices (rather than gases), and tholin experiments now routinely include other gases like N2, CO2, or CO. So what do scientists mean whey they say tholin? In general, we mean an abiotic complex organic solid that formed by chemistry from energy input into simple, cosmically relevant gases or solids. Shorter still, “abiotic complex organic gunk” works for me. You can see, perhaps, why Sagan and Khare felt the need to make up a word to capture this idea.

Indeed, tholin turns out to be incredibly chemically complex. Ultra-high-resolution mass spectrometry measurements I analyzed while in graduate school demonstrated that tholin contains at a minimum 10,000 different molecular formulas, which, once you account for different structures (isomers), could mean hundreds of thousands of different compounds! We have detected molecules in tholin with masses equivalent to about 80 carbon atoms, although we know that much heavier ions are present in Titan’s atmosphere!

A final note on nomenclature: one of the biggest difficulties with the word "tholin" is that it is incredibly nonspecific. The best analogy I have been able to come up with is “salad”. Salad, like tholin, is a mixture of a number of different compounds and spans a fairly broad range of materials. Most of us would agree on a case-by-case basis whether or not something is a salad, but the definition is not at all specific and the material itself depends on the starting materials, preparation, temperature, etc. We sometimes refer to “Titan tholin” or “Triton tholin” but even then you would need to ask about temperature, energy source, precursor gas or ice mixture, etc. to get an actual understanding of what the material is. Personally, I try to use the word “tholins” only when describing the laboratory-produced samples, in part because we do not really know yet how similar the material we produce in the lab is to the material found on places like Titan or Triton (or Pluto!). In fact, I usually call the samples produced in my laboratory “Titan aerosol analogues” rather than “tholins.”
Click to expand...

Lots more at the link. And in case you're wondering

Yes, the author/scientist is a hottie.

Tuckerfan · Aug 7, 2015

Just stumbled across this

steve2^4 · Aug 9, 2015

Book now!

We Are Borg · Aug 10, 2015

Tuckerfan said: ↑

Just stumbled across this
Click to expand...

Lots more at the artist's amazing website:

www.stevethomasart.com

I think I'm redoing all the artwork in my "man cave" (!)

Tuckerfan · Aug 15, 2015

Nerdworld.

We're Actively Creating the Geekiest World in the Universe

It’s no secret that scientists are incredible, unrepentant geeks, so we really shouldn’t be surprised that the tentative maps for Pluto and Charon read like the most awesome mishmash of exploration history and popular culture to ever grace a planetary system. And every single place holds a story.

The New Horizons science team is busy labelling all interesting features on the dwarf planet Pluto and its supersized moon Charon with unofficial names. While we were delighted when the first few placenames on Pluto were all dark gods, we’re even more thrilled that Charon is being populated by some of our favourite explorers from science fiction.
Click to expand...

Pluto: A Land of Nightmares and Brave Souls

Tentative place name map for Pluto as of July 29, 2015. Image credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Places on Pluto have dark themes — alternate names for the Underworld, deities or explorers of the Underworld, and any writers, scientists, or engineers associated with Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. Each theme is assigned to a different type of feature.

Space missions and spacecraft are subdivided by where the spacecraft travelled. Earth-orbiting spacecraft claim the plains (planum) and any small knobs or hills (colles). Lunar spacecraft are the namesakes of any elongated markings (linea), while interplanetary spacecraft get the most extensive land masses (terra).

Underworld creatures understandably get the mysterious dark spots (macula) and regions (regio), while alternate names for underworlds or specific locations within the underworld claim ridges (dorsa) and deep-sided depressions (cavus). Any travellers to the underworld collect the long-narrow depressions (fossa).

Scientists and Engineers claim the craters, and the bright regions (regio) of undetermined origin. Historic Explorers get the rest—mountains (montes), steep banks (rupes), and valleys (vallis).

The Darkened Equator: Where Dark Gods Roam

Pluto has a strange, dark band around its equator, all mysterious dark regions and spots named for the denizens of the underworld. Meng-p’o Macula is named for the old lady who ensures that all memories are forgotten before souls are reincarnated out of the Chinese underworld. The dark regions squeezing into the tail of the heart are Cthulhu Regio and Krun Regio. Cthulhu is a winged elder god with face tentacles from the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, while Krun is a giant flesh-mountain and Overlord of the lowermost level of the Underworld from Mandaean faith. Continuing east, Ala Macula is named for an Ibo goddess of fertility and death from Nigeria. Balrog Macula is the first of many Tolkien tributes, the namesake of an evil, underground creature from the Mines of Moria who threatened Gandalf the Grey. Finally, Vacub-Came and Hun-Came are a pair of death gods from Mayan mythology.
Click to expand...

Tombaugh Regio: Mountains of Explorers and Hills of Spacecraft

Detail map of the western lobe of Tombaugh Regio. Image credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

The most distinctive feature of Pluto is a massive, bright heart. It is Tombaugh Regio, named for Clyde Tombaugh (1906-1997), the astronomer who discovered Pluto. Costeau Rupes are a set of steep banks around the top curve of the heart named for Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1910-1997), the French ocean explorer. The western side of Tombaugh Regio is lined by a series of mountain ranges. From north to south, they are al-Idris Montes, Zheng He Montes, Hillary Montes, and Norgay Montes. Along the interior is Sputnik Planum, an young landscape of oddly-smooth plains.

al-Idris Montes are named for Ash-Sharīf al-Idrīsī (1099-1165), an Arab explorer and mapmaker, and geographical advisor to the King of Sicily. Baré Montes are named for the French botanist Jeanne Baré (1740-1807) who disguised herself as a man in order to circumnavigate the Earth. She was the first to formally identify and describe hundreds of plant species including bougainvillea. Zheng He Montes are the namesake of Zheng He (1371-1433, né Ma He), a Chinese admiral, diplomat, and eunuch who widened the spice trade. He led expeditions to around the Indian Ocean, Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and almost into Mozambique Channel to expand trade with Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

Hillary and Norgay Montes are a matched set of mountain ranges named for the mountaineering explorers who first summited Mount Everest in 1953. Tenzing Norgay (1914-1986, né Namgyal Wangdi) was a Tibetan who later relocated to Nepal, working as a porter on the first Everest reconnoissance missions, then as a sirdar (organizer of sherpas) for several more failed expeditions until reaching the summit with Hillary on May 29, 1953. Sir Edmund Hillary (1919-2008) was a mountaineer and explorer from New Zealand. He spent his later life advocating for sherpa welfare including building schools, hospitals, and airfields.

The largest interior plains of that make up the western lobe of the heart are the Sputnik Planum, named for the the first artificial satellite to circle the Earth. The original space explorer was launched by the Soviet Union in 1957. Five distinct hills have earned name: Coleta de Dados, the first fully-Brazillian satellite; Soyuz (Союз, “Union”), honouring the human space transport vehicle; Astrid, the first Swedish micro-satellites that were dedicated to studying auroras in 1995 and 1998; and Challenger and Columbia for the NASA space shuttles lost in 1986 and 2003.
Click to expand...

West of the Heart: Depressions and Craters

The small dark spot northeast of Voyager Terra is Cadejo Macula, named for an evil spirit from Central American folklore. The spirit takes the form of a large, shaggy dog with burning eyes that roams the night. The dog is either white or black — one cadejo protects travellers, the other leads to bad decisions — but either will drive travellers to insanity if they turn their back on the cadejo.

The lighter region to the west of Tombaugh Regio are Lowell Regio, named for astronomer Percival Lowell (1855-1916), initiator of the search for Pluto at his observatory. The three extended land masses are Venera Terra (венера, “Venus”), honouring the pioneering Soviet missions to explore Venus; Viking Terra for the NASA Mars orbiters and landers from 1976 to 1980; and Voyager Terra for the NASA space explorers who did the first flybys of the gas giants and continue now as Interstellar explorers.

Lowell at his titular observatory in 1914.

A series of long, thin depressions separate the regions. Djanggawul Fossae are a split-depression named for a divine trinity of two sisters and a brother in Yolngu culture who came from the island of the dead to create the Australian landscape. (That island, Baralku, has its namesake on Saturn’s moon Titan.) Inanna and Dumuzi Fossa are named for a goddess and her husband: the Sumerian goddess was revived from a journey to the underworld when her husband took her place. Virgil and Beatrice are another matched set, tour guides from Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Virgil was a guide through Inferno and Purgatory, while Beatrice led visitors through Paradise.

Kupe Vallis widens into an actual valley cutting through Voyager Terra. It is named for the 10th century Polynesian explorer who discovered New Zealand, and later became a key character in Maori mythology.

The largest crater in the hemisphere is named for Venetia Burney (1918-2009), the British lady who named Pluto when she was a young girl. She suggested the name to her grandfather Falconer Madan, an Oxford librarian, who passed the name along to Herbert Hall Turner, an astronomer with the Royal Astronomical Society.

Studio portrait of Burney in 1929 around the time she named Pluto. Image credit: J. Weston & Son Photographers

The remaining craters in the region are named for a scattering of scientists and engineers. Jan Oort (1900-1992) is the Dutch astronomer who worked extensively to characterize the Milky Way’s structure and rotation, and theorized that our solar system was surrounded by a vast cloud of comets. K. Edgeworth Crater is named for Kenneth Edgeworth (1880-1972), an Irish astronomer who speculated about the existence of a belt of asteroids and short-period comets in the outer solar system, an idea developed by Gerard P. Kuiper into the Kuiper Belt. James Elliot (1943-2011) was the planetary scientist who used occupation techniques to first discover then study Pluto’s atmosphere. Robert Harrington (1942-2005) co-discovered Pluto’s massive moon Charon with James W. Christy. The final two craters are named for administrators: Henry Brinton (1935-2005) was key to getting early Pluto missions funded through NASA, while Harlan Smith (1924-1991) was the director of the McDonald Observatory responsible for many ground-based studies of the dwarf planet.
Click to expand...

East of the Heart: Freckled Craters and Bulging Ridges

The biggest regions east of the heart are the lighter Pioneer and Hayabusa Terra. Pioneer is for the NASA missions that explored the sun, moon, Jupiter, and Saturn between 1958 and 1997, while Hayabusa (はやぶさ, “Peregrine Falcon”) is the Japanese robot who completed a sample return from the asteroid 25143 Itokawa. The top of Hayabusa is framed by Eriksson Rupes, a set of steep banks named for the Icelandic explorer Leif Eriksson (970-1020) who is likely the first European to visit North America.

The Tartarus Dorsa ridges are named for the pit of lost souls from the Underworld of Greek Mytholopgy. The ridges are cut by narrow depressions, the Sleipnir Fossa and Sun Wukong Fossa. Sleipnir is named for the eight-legged horse of Norse mythology who can enter the Underworld yet still return, and who was vital to the adventures of the beloved god Balder. Sun Wukong is a powerful Monkey King who was dragged into the the Chinese Underworld but managed to escape with immortality.

North of the heart is dotted with smaller craters: Farinella, Coradini, Safronov, Giclas, Kowal, Pulfrich, Drake, Hollis, and Guest. Each crater is a tribute to exploration and discovery. Paolo Farinella (1953-2000) is an Italian astronomer who advanced theories on small body dynamics, including the tidal evolution of Pluto and Charon. Angioletta Coradini (1946-2011) was an Italian planetary scientist who researched the formation of the solar system including working on Apollo sample returns. Viktor Safronov (1917-1999) is a Russian planetary scientist who developed the theory of planetary accretion, and refined theories on the formation of the Oort cloud. Henry Giclas (1910-2007) was an astronomer with Lowell Observatory who focused on tracking proper motions of stars and discovered several asteroids and comets.

Charles Kowal (1940-2011) was a planetary scientist responsible for for discovering 2060 Chiron, the first Centaur during our earliest observations of the Kuiper Belt. Carl Pulfrich (1858-1927) was a German astronomer who invented the blink comparator, an instrument that rapidly flipped between images to allow the human eye to spot changes.

Michael Drake (1946-2011) was involved in a series of high-profile space projects from Cassini, HiRISE, and even the upcoming OSIRIS-Rex asteroid sample return. He was the chair of the Solar System Exploration Committee Solar System Exploration Committee when it recommended a Pluto mission to NASA. Andrew J. Hollis (1947-2005) was British astronomer specializing in asteroids, a skilled visual observer and pioneer of photoelectric photometry who obtained some of the earliest lightcurves for brighter asteroids. Finally, John Guest (1938-2012) was a field volcanologist who argued that lunar craters were impact-generated despite the then-popular theory that they were volcanic in origin. He worked on NASA’s early planetary exploration projects including Mariner 10, Viking, and Magellan.
Click to expand...

The Far Side of Pluto: Odd Little Lines

On the far side of Pluto from the iconic heart is a set of lineaments. Chandrayaan, Luna, and Yutu Linea form a set of elongated markings all named for lunar exploration spacecraft. Chandrayaan (चन्द्रयान, “Moon vehicle”) is named for Indian’s first robotic moon mission in 2008-2009; Luna (луна, “moon”) is a series of fifteen Soviet orbiters and landers from 1959 to 1976; and Yutu (玉兔, “Jade Rabbit”) is the first Chinese lunar rover that explored away from the Chang’e lander in 2014.

Between them and the heart is Simonelli Crater. The only other crater of substantial size on Pluto is named for for Damon Simonelli (1958-2004), a planetary scientist who specialized in the shapes and physical properties of small satellites including theories of Pluto’s interior.
Click to expand...

Below the Heart: A Last-Ditch Reach to Horror

Below the heart is a cluster of odd features. The largest is Pandemonium Dorsa, ridges named for the capital of Hell in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, an epic poem.

Between it and Norgay Montes are Morgoth Macula, dark spots named for the Satan in Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, and Quidlivun Cavus, a deep-sided depression named for the place on the moon souls ascend to during the afterlife according to Inuit mythology.
Click to expand...

Charon: A World of Exploration

Charon is a slightly less ominous destination if you can just get past the massive Mordor Macula. Places on the moon are named for destinations and milestones of fictional exploration, the people that explored those fictional lands, and the vessels that carried them to their mysterious destinations. Again, the types of names are each classified to different types of features, but this time the result is an epic tribute to popular culture and fandoms.

Fictional origins and destinations take all the regions (regio), light or dark, and any weird dark spots (macula). Fictional explorers and travellers nab the craters, and the fictional vessels that carry them get all chasms (chasma). Breaking away from fiction to the content creators themselves, any exploration authors, artists, and directors can be the namesake of mountains (mons).

The most distinctive feature on Charon is a mysteriously dark north pole, named Mordor Regio after the region ruled by the dark lord Sauron in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

New Horizons has only returned images of a small patch of Charon in high enough resolution to definitively pick out features, so nearly all the named locations are in one tight region. The western half of the region of clearer imagery is dominated by Star Wars and Doctor Who, while the central region is an extensive tribute to Star Trek. On the far east boundary of the region of clear imagery is Argo Chasma, a massive chasm named for the ship that carried Jason and the Argonauts on their epic sagas in Greek mythology.
Click to expand...

Western Charon: Star Wars, Alien, and Doctor Who

To the north are Organa, Skywalker, and Vader craters, named for Princess Leia Organa, her brother Luke Skywalker, and their father and Darth Vader from George Lucas’ Star Wars. Below the force-wielding cluster is a tribute to Alien, with Ripley Crater cross-cutting Nostromos Chasma. The crater is named for Ellen Ripley, heroine of the 1979 film, while the chasm bares the name of her spaceship.

Nasreddin Crater is a stand-alone namesake landmark, named for Nasreddin Hoca. Hoca is a whimsical character in Middle Easter and eastern European folklore, frequently escribed as riding a donkey backwards as he explores the world.

Doctor Who claims the next patch of Charon, with a large dark spot baring the name of the titular Doctor’s home planet, Gallifrey. The region is cross-cut by a deep chasm, Tardis Chasma, named for his time machine and spaceship. The adjacent Alice Crater is named for the heroine in Lewis Carroll’s surrealistic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

The southernmost near-parallel chasm is Macross Chasma, named for the titular spaceship in a Japanese animation created by Shōji Kawamori. One last crater is even farther south, Nemo Crater named for the submarine captain in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
Click to expand...

Central Charon: Firefly, Star Trek, and 2001

Serenity Chasma continues the array of semi-parallel chasms, and is a tribute to the spaceship n the Joss Whedon television series Firefly. (Commenter alliterator points out this means we finally know the location of Serenity Valley, location of the ship-naming battle so important in the personal histories of Captain Malcolm Reynolds and his crew.)

The large plateau or high plain Vulcan Planum marks out a region dedicated to Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek. It is named for the fictional homeworld of the Vulcans, including Mr. Spock. Each crater bares the name of a crew member of the Starship Enterprise from the original series: Captain James T. Kirk, First Officer Mr. Spock, Senior Helmsman Lt. Hikaru Sulu, and Communications Officer Lt. Nyota Uhura. The two mountains in the region are named in tribute to 2001: A Space Odyssey: Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008), the author, and Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999), the director, who closely collaborated to create the classic.

Southeast of the Vulcan Planum is Butler Mons, a mountain named for Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006), author of the Xenogenesis trilogy where spacefaring humans return to Earth, and Kaguya-hime Crater, named for an infant girl in Japanese folklore who came from the moon and lived among humans before returning home.

All of the informal names on Pluto and Charon fit the approved and accepted naming schemes for each world, and will eventually be submitted to the International Astronomer’s Union for formal adoption. They are also pure, distilled, pop culturey goodness with Cthulhu and Balrog munching on Pluto’s equator and the north pole of Charon engulfed in the vastness of Mordor. Every single location hides a story of people and places being honoured. Keep on keeping on, New Horizons scientists: we love how you’re pushing mixing the boundaries between science and science fiction on the outer bounds of our solar system.
Click to expand...

Tuckerfan · Aug 30, 2015

New Horizons next target selected. It's a comet-like object, 45 billion klicks from Pluto and leaves them with a lot of fuel to potentially examine other objects. http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34103829

Tuckerfan · Sep 23, 2016

Pluto may have a liquid ocean 62 miles deep under its surface.

In recent months, there’s been growing evidence that Pluto is hiding a liquid water ocean beneath its frozen surface. New models by researchers at Brown University support this hypothesis, and take it one mind-boggling step further: Pluto’s ocean may be more than 100 kilometers (62 miles) deep.

That conclusion, which is published this week in Geophysical Research Letters, came about through a simple observation about Sputnik Planum, the enormous, heart-shaped crater that dominates the dwarf planet’s midsection. It turns out Sputnik Planum sits directly on the tidal axis linking Pluto to its largest moon, Charon.

As other researchers have noted, this curious position suggests Sputnik Planum is a positive mass anomaly—an unusually heavy patch of Pluto’s crust. In fact, it’s thought that the enormous asteroid responsible for creating Sputnik Planum struck somewhere near the north pole, but that over time, Pluto’s heart became heavy and caused the entire planet to tip over.
Click to expand...

Or to put it another way, that's how high SpaceShipOne had to fly to win the X-Prize.

Tuckerfan · Oct 19, 2016

Pluto might have clouds.

Pluto may be a dwarf planet on the edge of the Solar System, but the New Horizons flyby showed conclusively it has a tenuous atmosphere. Its pressure is 100,000 times less than the Earth's atmosphere and it is made up mainly of nitrogen with traces of methane and carbon monoxide, all of which have sublimated from Plutonian ice, but NASA says the hazy atmosphere is complex and shows strong seasonal changes that take decades to occur as the various ices sublimate then refreeze on other areas of the planet.

However, the one thing that hasn't been seen before on Pluto is clouds, which Alan Stern, principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado says would indicate a much more complex atmosphere than previously thought. But as New Horizons passed Pluto in 2015 and turned its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager and Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera on the sunlit rim, what seem isolated condensation clouds were seen.
Click to expand...

Tuckerfan · Oct 29, 2016

New Horizons has finished sending data.

The New Horizons probe had just one shot at gathering as much data from Pluto as it could, a process that took more than a day. But it's taken the past fifteen months to actually receive all 50-plus gigabytes of data that it captured. NASA announced this morning that the probe has finally sent back the last bit of data, a Pluto and Charon infra-red sequence. Next up, NASA plans to double-check the data it's received before wiping New Horizons' data recorder. Its next stop: the Kuiper Belt.

"The Pluto system data that New Horizons collected has amazed us over and over again with the beauty and complexity of Pluto and its system of moons," Alan Stern, New Horizons' mission head said in a statement. "There's a great deal of work ahead for us to understand the 400-plus scientific observations that have all been sent to Earth. And that's exactly what we're going to do—after all, who knows when the next data from a spacecraft visiting Pluto will be sent?"
Click to expand...

Soma · Oct 29, 2016

Tuckerfan said: ↑

New Horizons has finished sending data.

The New Horizons probe had just one shot at gathering as much data from Pluto as it could, a process that took more than a day. But it's taken the past fifteen months to actually receive all 50-plus gigabytes of data that it captured. NASA announced this morning that the probe has finally sent back the last bit of data, a Pluto and Charon infra-red sequence. Next up, NASA plans to double-check the data it's received before wiping New Horizons' data recorder. Its next stop: the Kuiper Belt.

"The Pluto system data that New Horizons collected has amazed us over and over again with the beauty and complexity of Pluto and its system of moons," Alan Stern, New Horizons' mission head said in a statement. "There's a great deal of work ahead for us to understand the 400-plus scientific observations that have all been sent to Earth. And that's exactly what we're going to do—after all, who knows when the next data from a spacecraft visiting Pluto will be sent?"
Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Does NASA make this data available to the general public?

Tuckerfan · Oct 29, 2016

Soma said: ↑

Tuckerfan said: ↑

New Horizons has finished sending data.

The New Horizons probe had just one shot at gathering as much data from Pluto as it could, a process that took more than a day. But it's taken the past fifteen months to actually receive all 50-plus gigabytes of data that it captured. NASA announced this morning that the probe has finally sent back the last bit of data, a Pluto and Charon infra-red sequence. Next up, NASA plans to double-check the data it's received before wiping New Horizons' data recorder. Its next stop: the Kuiper Belt.

"The Pluto system data that New Horizons collected has amazed us over and over again with the beauty and complexity of Pluto and its system of moons," Alan Stern, New Horizons' mission head said in a statement. "There's a great deal of work ahead for us to understand the 400-plus scientific observations that have all been sent to Earth. And that's exactly what we're going to do—after all, who knows when the next data from a spacecraft visiting Pluto will be sent?"
Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Does NASA make this data available to the general public?
Click to expand...

Eventually. Some of the data is released to the public immediately and some of it is released to specific academic groups, before becoming public after a set period of time. All of it, save probably the technical details of the nuclear engine, will be available on the web for access by anyone in a few years.

Aurora · Nov 21, 2016

Tuckerfan said: ↑

Pluto may have a liquid ocean 62 miles deep under its surface.

In recent months, there’s been growing evidence that Pluto is hiding a liquid water ocean beneath its frozen surface. New models by researchers at Brown University support this hypothesis, and take it one mind-boggling step further: Pluto’s ocean may be more than 100 kilometers (62 miles) deep.

That conclusion, which is published this week in Geophysical Research Letters, came about through a simple observation about Sputnik Planum, the enormous, heart-shaped crater that dominates the dwarf planet’s midsection. It turns out Sputnik Planum sits directly on the tidal axis linking Pluto to its largest moon, Charon.

As other researchers have noted, this curious position suggests Sputnik Planum is a positive mass anomaly—an unusually heavy patch of Pluto’s crust. In fact, it’s thought that the enormous asteroid responsible for creating Sputnik Planum struck somewhere near the north pole, but that over time, Pluto’s heart became heavy and caused the entire planet to tip over.
Click to expand...

Or to put it another way, that's how high SpaceShipOne had to fly to win the X-Prize.
Click to expand...

And where's liquid water there may be... you know.

Just imagine. A comet, which there are plenty of out there, smashes into Pluto and brings some organic stuff with it. Now that would be a place to find life, wouldn't it. Forget Mars, forget the Jovian Moons, forget Titan, go look on fucking Pluto

Tuckerfan · Dec 3, 2016

Christopher said: ↑

gturner said: ↑

So do binary star systems fail as stars?
Click to expand...

You hear of any successful binary stars in Hollywood?
Click to expand...

Lanzman said: ↑

Bradjolina.
Click to expand...

Not anymore.

ed629 · Dec 3, 2016

Finding any life, or the evidence of extinct life on any of the other planets in our solar system would change so much about what we know our believe we know. It could mean that the unverse is teeming with life. It could be entirely possible that almost any star can have a system with some type of life in it

Bickendan · Dec 4, 2016

^"Life, uh, finds a way."

Tuckerfan · Apr 13, 2017

New Horizons takes a nap.

Goodnight, New Horizons. Sleep Well.

DO SPACE PROBES DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?

NASA’s Pluto probe, New Horizons, has been hard at work for the past 852 days and has earned its epic five-month-long nap that just began on Monday, April 10. Imagine working for almost two-and-a-half years straight — you’d welcome a bit of hibernation yourself.

The period of rest is meant to reduce wear and tear and allow for the allocation of resources, such as funds and personnel, to other NASA missions. According to New Horizons mission operations manager Alice Bowman in a news release, “We’re looking forward [to] taking advantage of the reduced mission operations workload during this hibernation, as well as one early next year, to plan much of the MU69 flyby.”

The hibernation will continue until September 11. At that point, the extended New Horizons mission begins its next leg, which will focus on observing objects in the Kuiper Belt.

PEEKING AT PLUTO

New Horizons has been an invaluable contributor to NASA’s space exploration initiative. Since the mission’s launch in January 2006, it has helped the space agency meet its goal to “explore the mysterious, icy worlds at the edge of our solar system and tell us about the origin and evolution of our planetary neighbors.”

Alan Stern, the head of the mission, shared some inspiring words on the goals of the New Horizons mission in an interview with Futurism:

Beyond the obvious — that we’re creating new knowledge — we create a greater society. We do something which is, in the case of great exploration, historic. It’s something people read about, not just days and weeks later, but decades and centuries later. It makes a mark for our time of what we aspire to be, which is a greater society.
New Horizons is bringing us closer to that greater society. Learning more about the farthest reaches of our solar system will help us understand our place here in the Universe.
Click to expand...

Lanzman · Apr 14, 2017

Gotta conserve power way out there.

Paladin · Apr 14, 2017

Sleep well, New Horizons. May you wake to face a new dawn.

Bickendan · Apr 14, 2017

Paladin said: ↑

Sleep well, New Horizons. May you wake to face a new dawn.
Click to expand...

And on that note:

Tuckerfan · Aug 5, 2017

New Horizons may get a two-fer on its next "stop."

Pluto Probe May Get 2 Objects for Price of 1 During Next Flyby

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft may double its pleasure during its next deep-space flyby 16 months from now.

On Jan. 1, 2019, New Horizons is scheduled to have a close encounter with a body called 2014 MU69, which lies 1 billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto in the distant, frigid Kuiper Belt. (The probe famously zoomed past Pluto in July 2015, returning the first-ever up-close images of that mysterious world. This second flyby is the key component of New Horizons' extended mission.)

Not much is known about 2014 MU69, so the New Horizons team planned out a campaign to watch the object pass in front of background stars. Such "occultations" can reveal a great deal about the foreground body, including its size and shape. [Destination Pluto: NASA's New Horizons Mission in Pictures]

Mission team members decamped to various spots around the globe to watch three occultations this year, one each on June 2, July 10 and July 17. Observations of the most recent one, which scientists made from southern Argentina, suggest that 2014 MU69 may actually be two separate bodies, New Horizons team members said.

These two objects may be orbiting each other closely, or they could be touching, the team members added.

"This new finding is simply spectacular. The shape of MU69 is truly provocative, and could mean another first for New Horizons going to a binary object in the Kuiper Belt," mission principal investigator Alan Stern, from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement. "I could not be happier with the occultation results, which promise a scientific bonanza for the flyby."

It's also possible that 2014 MU69 is a single object — one that's relatively long and skinny, or a more spherical one with a big chunk taken out of it, NASA officials said. Further analysis of the occultation data may allow New Horizons team members to get to the bottom of the mystery, the officials added.

Thanks to the occultation observations, MU69's size is now better understood as well. If the flyby target is a single body, it's no more than 19 miles (30 km) long. If it's a binary, each of the two pieces is 9 miles to 12 miles (15 to 20 km) long, mission scientists said.

The occultation campaign was an extensive effort that involved a number of assets and instruments. For example, NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) — a 747 jet equipped with a 100-inch (2.5 meters) telescope — observed the July 10 event. And mission team members used observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's Gaia spacecraft to choose the best viewing spots on the ground.

"Both of these space satellites were crucial to the success of the entire occultation campaign," Stern said.
Click to expand...

Dinner · Aug 5, 2017

Christopher said: ↑

Dayton3 said: ↑

Bickendan said: ↑

Bickendan said: ↑

Click to expand...

Seriously though, as long as you have Zelda, your GameBoy's set
Click to expand...

I'm more partial to the TNG game, the TOS game, and Paper Boy.
Click to expand...

Paper Boy?!

Click to expand...

I used to play that on C64. Oh, and spy hunter as well.

Log in or Sign up

Message From Pluto

Dayton Kitchens Banned

Tuckerfan BMF

Tuckerfan BMF

Dayton Kitchens Banned

Bickendan Custom Title Administrator Faceless Mook Writer

Bickendan Custom Title Administrator Faceless Mook Writer

Dayton Kitchens Banned

Bickendan Custom Title Administrator Faceless Mook Writer

gul Revolting Beer Drinker Administrator Formerly Important

Tuckerfan BMF

Tuckerfan BMF

steve2^4 Aged Meat

We Are Borg Republican Democrat

Tuckerfan BMF

Tuckerfan BMF

Tuckerfan BMF

Tuckerfan BMF

Tuckerfan BMF

Soma OMG WTF LOL STFU ROTFL!!!

Tuckerfan BMF

Aurora Vincerò!

Tuckerfan BMF

ed629 Morally Inept Banned

Bickendan Custom Title Administrator Faceless Mook Writer

Tuckerfan BMF

Lanzman Vast, Cool and Unsympathetic Formerly Important

Paladin Overjoyed Man of Liberty

Bickendan Custom Title Administrator Faceless Mook Writer

Tuckerfan BMF

Dinner 2012 & 2014 Master Prognosticator

Log in or Sign up

Message From Pluto

Dayton Kitchens Banned

Tuckerfan BMF

Tuckerfan BMF

Dayton Kitchens Banned

Bickendan Custom Title Administrator Faceless Mook Writer

Bickendan Custom Title Administrator Faceless Mook Writer

Dayton Kitchens Banned

Bickendan Custom Title Administrator Faceless Mook Writer

gul Revolting Beer Drinker Administrator Formerly Important

Tuckerfan BMF

Tuckerfan BMF

steve2^4 Aged Meat

We Are Borg Republican Democrat

Tuckerfan BMF

Tuckerfan BMF

Tuckerfan BMF

Tuckerfan BMF

Tuckerfan BMF

Soma OMG WTF LOL STFU ROTFL!!!

Tuckerfan BMF

Aurora Vincerò!

Tuckerfan BMF

ed629 Morally Inept Banned

Bickendan Custom Title Administrator Faceless Mook Writer

Tuckerfan BMF

Lanzman Vast, Cool and Unsympathetic Formerly Important

Paladin Overjoyed Man of Liberty

Bickendan Custom Title Administrator Faceless Mook Writer

Tuckerfan BMF

Dinner 2012 & 2014 Master Prognosticator

Useful Searches