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Nice!
A few Minutes and counting.
16 months and counting...for all the data to be downloaded back to earth via 3 Satellites in different parts of the world. I hear they are slower than 56k modems and it takes about 50 minutes to get a low resolution image.
But of course we already got some fun stuff back, and will get some good stuff pretty soon.
The image was from 3 hours ago, so we will have to wait for the new one when New Horizons finish work with the data and send the last pic ..so exciting !
Yep, Goldstone, Madrid, and Canberra.
And now, for several hours, nail biting while NH is doing its job without comms to Earth. Tonight, if everything went OK, it will send back the first telemetries saying "hello, I am still alive!". After that, for several months, the data captured in these hours.
And it is allot of data. How many cameras, lol. 4 separate images for the color camera alone, for each 'Shot'.
(EDIT) Tho my nail biting, also has to doo with taking pics, while moving at velocity. Weather satellites don't move relative to the ground (geostationary), and other ones (spy/global imagers) rotate the camera to compensate. So there is always a chance for Motion-blur.
Here is the Schedule
Wednesday, July 15th
Thursday, July 16th
Friday, July 17th
Saturday, July 18th
Monday, July 20th
NASA TV live stream now...just started
http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/13/8949959/nasa-new-horizons-pluto-flyby-date-time-livestream
40 million views....not bad...
oh and this mission started with 250 watts, so less than Voyager 1 started with by 200 watts. WOW.
All of the details and contingencies are just amazing.
Truly one of the best faces of humanity on display today.
History in making and we was the witness of that today , I got even emotional the atmosphere just take over me .. we need more events like that ..it bring us Earth's children all together ...and the Plutonians today was like.. Daaaamn ! Earth's Aliens Spy Invasion lol
Did you noticed the answers about the tectonic plates ? they still don't know if the core is still active .. but definitely it "snowing" on Pluto lol
found bigger shot from NASA but not last
That's a great closeup of the "heart". And I notice there's not all that many craters — which says interesting things about what's been happenning on the surface over the last billion years or so.
Coming soon, the first of the count-the-nostril-hairs closeups!
Especially considering how beat up it's moon is. Can't wait till they start using data to determine the cause.
First!
...I'm excted as you all are, I keep refreshing my google search which is pointless since I think it comes back on line at 9:02 p.m. EDT.
Great to see what Pluto is really like after decades of "artists' impressions" which turn out to be pure products of the imagination.
We should celebrate by reinstating Pluto as a planet. I hear that one of the astronomers involved in the project always refers to Pluto as a planet, despite the ruling that it's just a "dwarf planet". Pluto has 4 moons with badass names like Cerberus and Styx—surely it deserves to be classified as a planet. Plus it's just plain preducial to deny it planet class just because it's small. This would never wash if it was a person, and planets are people too!
Edit to correct: 5 moons! Forgot about Hydra ;)
Well a good impression actually comes from someone who understands the science behind it, and they are creating the images based on what we have observed. Got to remember before we put cameras in telescopes people were drawing what they observed. There is a lot of value in that.
So with places like Pluto, observations captured by less detailed imaging, plus other data combined allows them to create impressions based on more than just pure imagination.
Also they didn't knock Pluto down purely because of it's size, there is an equally controversial piece of the equation. It's debated wheter or not the third criteria for being a Planet is a valid one to use because Pluto wouldn't be the only planet knocked down in status. But being the non-specialist I am, I'll stay out of it *wink*
I will say having a handful of moons is nice and all, but you need at least 60 named ones and a few thousands unnamed ones to really be impressive these days ;)
well pluto okay, but what interests me the most is: have these gas planets like jupiter a solid core or is it all just gas? Well the gravity of jupiter is so huge it must have a solid core.
Perhaps "Honorary planet"? Or "Runner-up planet", or "Wanna-be planet", or "Runt planet"?
How about "I wouldn't want to be part of any astronomical category that would have me as a member?"
Really, it's just an excuse for old fogeys to be able to say, "In MY day we had NINE planets".
I was thinking of the vague paintings of Pluto I remember as a kid, which I think were mostly pure imagination. No doubt more recent ones have more evidence to base them on. As for Pluto's planet status, I agree, it's not just size, and I'm happy to go along with the consensus of people who know about these things, but I get the impression the decision is nevertheless controversial. I guess the desire to maintain Pluto's status as a planet is more to do with tradition than anything else. It doesn't really matter, does it? Pluto is what it is.
Not quite. It's a matter of taxes. Planets are tax exempt. All other bodies must pay taxes to be in the neighborhood. It's a model very similar to human societies. The bigwigs, somehow end up evading taxes.
It's alive!
Yes, there should be a very hot solid rocky (probably) core down in the middle somewhere, probably a few tens of times the size of Earth. On top of that is a deep "mantle" of hot liquid hydrogen so compressed it behaves like a metal. The thin layer on top, the last 10,000km or so (yes, Jupiter is that big), gradually becomes less liquidy and more gassy, and might be fairly transparent — can you imagine the view...? The very top layer, maybe no thicker than Earth's atmosphere, is where all the clouds and visible colour comes from.
Yes, there's a lot of probablies there; we just don't know enough yet. The Juno mission scheduled to go into orbit this time next year should help nail down some numbers.
THIS is what I thought I was quoting above. Sheesh.
Yea, we humans from the "Dwarf Planet Earth" made a craft, sent it to Pluto, and got some really EPIC photos.
As for the rest, as it was explained to me, while I rolled my eyes thinking the following. No Planet has a circular orbit, there all ovals. No planet is perfectly in the celestial plain, the all have some tilt to them. And there is still rocks slamming into the earth to this day. Chelyabinsk meteor, anyone? If no one noticed the "B612" in my sig, That is a project to detect Near-Earth-"rocks", Some of them are not friendly little rocks, lol. Granted my map is a few years out of date, it's enough to demote Earth, lol. ROFL.
Tho I digress. Congrats to the team for getting there, and bringing us throes really cool pics of what was once just a single pixel of light.
Mec4d, thanks for that link, I kind of got distracted with watching that for some time.
(EDIT)
Moons, many of them. If they came from elsewhere, how did they get into orbit around Pluto. There is not enough atmosphere for a 'Resistive medium'. And quite like New Horizons, rocks cant fire rockets to slow down into orbit, lol. The only way I can think of, is something akin to a "Glancing Blow" that puts a ring of debris around the parent body that then coalesces into a moon. And apparently that process is very common indeed, how many moons (TBD).
So, IF, that Glancing blow happened to produce all of throes moons, How much of those geologic features on Pluto are just resolidification of the surface after such "Glancing Blow" impacts. Much to consider about all this, lol.
An attractive idea, but probably ruled out due to the timescales. Pluto and its moons probably existed pretty much as they are today within several hundred million years of the formation of the solar system. Pluto's young surfaces will almost definitely turn out to be less (probably a lot less) than a billion years old. Collision is still one of the more likely sources for those little scraps of moons in near-circular orbits (which is a bit odd in itself), but the event was most likely long before whatever happened on Pluto's surface.
Agreed very much, even little wisps of atmosphere, solar heated off-gassing, etc, can cause something akin to weathering. And there is no idea on the age of the moons or the surface as of yet. Tho it is also not known (IF, with strong emphases), Pluto also has/had radiological elements in it's core that could have prolonged a liquid core after the formation of the moons. There are so many unknowns. Tho.. There are only so many ways without external forces (like controlled rocket engines) to get a moon into an almost circular orbit. And that even leaves many questions about all of the moons of Pluto. A single disk of debris alone would not produce that many moons, it would take a few different ones spinning at different speeds around Pluto (That is relatively simple Orbital mechanics).
I'm also quite curious about the mentioned 'Cliff faces' on Pluto, that was visible in one photo at least, and pointed out in a (Breakfast with) vid. I've yet to look at the pictures my self. I'm working on first cup of coffee here, and you can bet, I want to see the surface of Pluto in Studio.
(EDIT) By liquid core, I'm not explicitly implying a Lava core like earth. That far out and that cold, it may be anything that would be a gas here on earth. Here we have Silica Rocks, there it may be Nitrogen Rocks for example, lol.
(EDIT2) IF, that is indeed shadows cast by a cliff-face, that is impressive. It also has the appearance of 'Clouds' at that lack of resolution as well. Frozen cloud cliff-face??? difficult to say, lol.