New Horizons

A man-made object is about to reach Pluto. Anyone else excited about this?

Didn't hear about that. That is pretty cool, though.

I'm excited like fish swim. :)

C’mon guys. Everyone knows the space program is just an elaborate ruse to get other nations to bankrupt themselves.

I am unbelievably excited about this. I'm also excited about Dawn completing its higher resolution mapping of Ceres later this year.

Heck yes. Incidentally, New Horizons is something like the fifth fastest human-made object ever. And they did it without a solar swingby!

Ah! A glitch!

It got better.

Can't wait for it to arrive at Pluto and find that it is a planet after all, and that elitist inner planets are mean spirited losers.

The Kuiper belt is far more exciting to me, I will be patient.

The Atmospheric exchange is really cool, can't wait to get all nebby in Pluto's business.

Oh my gosh you guys, Pluto! It’s a place now!

That's no moon.

NASA received the signal!


Like Christopher said earlier:

THAT'S NO MOON!

Niiiiice, Craig!

Ceci n'est pas une lune?

Incidentally, I thought that I'd already seen that image… then I took a closer look and realized that I was looking at a different Pluto-as-Deathstar image.  I guess great minds think alike.

Woah! Not seeing any craters on Pluto was a big deal.

Planetary scientists generally assume that bolides hit a surface at a steady rate. So a surface with more craters is older than a surface with fewer craters. The Earth, for example, has a young surface - erosion, volcanoes, deposition, and other processes erase the craters that are there. The Moon, in contrast, has a ton of visible craters. So it must have an old surface, meaning that there aren’t as many - or as active - things happening to clean off craters.

Pluto and Charon apparently have VERY young surfaces. This is confusing, because it’s totally unclear where the energy to drive a crater-cleaning process could come from.

On a moon of Jupiter or Saturn, there’s plenty of that energy in the form of tides. In a simple sense, the huge planet raises a big tidal bulge in the bedrock of the moon, and the motion of that bulge with respect to the rest of the moon generates heat from friction. That’s how come so many of these moons have underground oceans, and how come Io has volcanoes.

But Pluto and Charon are tidally locked. They rotate synchronously. There’s no energy exchange there. Scientists thought that, on a body as small as Pluto or Charon, tidal friction would be the only viable energy source.

So there’s some energy source driving active processes on those two, tiny, distant worlds. They are cold, but far from dead!

The universe gets more awesome every time we take a close look at it.

In the lore of the Mass Effect games, Charon is actually an ancient alien faster-than-light relay covered in cosmic debris. I suspect the truth is slightly different, but that's a very interesting discovery. Also, I really like the phrase "tidally locked." I say it as often as I get the chance. 

Speaking of cool words, the closest point of a trajectory to Pluto is “perihadeon.”

A little tidbit from the NY Times article:

But with the slow communication rate from a 12-watt transmitter three billion miles away, it will take 16 months before scientists can examine all of that information.

How far away can you see a light bulb?

(For the record, I think there are actually two transmitters, each 12 watts. Still...)

…referencing Hades, the god of the dead and the Greek name for Pluto! That is super nifty. Do all the planets have words like that?

Yes! Earth is perigee/apogee (“gee” like “geo”) for closest and farthest points. The Moon is -lune, the sun is -helion, Mars is -areon, Jupiter is -jove, Saturn is -krone. Those are the ones I remember offhand. And I know there’s a super cool one for black holes, but I forgot it…

The general terms are periapsis and apoapsis. There’s a bunch more terms collected in the Wikipedia article for “apsis.”

Guys, guys! These Pluto pictures are amazing!

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/Press-Conferences/July-24-2015.php

Why did I have to learn the most important New Horizons' news from somewhere other than this thread?

Link

Link doesn't seem to work.

I don't know what you're talking about.

On an entirely different note, today I learned something about the way the >G forum addresses links without the qualifier "www." in front of it

I was referring to how the Hero of Hyrule doesn't have a normal job.

With so many people just losing Rupees in the grass, would you?