# Pluto / New Horizons



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

*Too frackin' cool. And we're still a year away from close encounter.....!*

*@NewHorizons2015*

BEHOLD! Pluto & Charon (~17,000 km apart) seen Monday by our LORRI camera. We're still over 400 million km away! 



New Horizons Twitter feed

Related links:

Official website: New Horizons @ NASA
Hubble helping out: Hubble to Proceed with Full Search for New Horizons Targets | NASA
ehMac thread: http://www.ehmac.ca/everything-else-eh/100969-pluto-now-up-5-confirmed-moons.html
ehMac thread: http://www.ehmac.ca/everything-else-eh/43860-so-long-pluto.html?highlight=Pluto


----------



## Kazak (Jan 19, 2004)

Thanks for this, CM.


----------



## SINC (Feb 16, 2001)

Kazak said:


> Thanks for this, CM.


Times two, great stuff, thanks!


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

*Update:* animated GIF of recent images that New Horizons is using as an optical navigation guide... look at how Charon just tugs Pluto all over the place! The centre-of-mass between these two bodies is in the empty space between these two bodies... (on earth, the centre of mass with the moon is about 1700km below earth's surface).










Cannot wait to see the imagery improve over the next year... this is gonna be one heckuva encounter! 

(Source: io9.com)


----------



## SINC (Feb 16, 2001)

I've got my popcorn ready for a ringside seat!


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

*Today's the day!*

*For Pluto-Bound NASA Probe, It's Wake-Up Time in Space*










A NASA spacecraft will wake up from its final nap today (Dec. 6) to begin preparations for an epic encounter with Pluto and its moons in 2015 that will cap a nine-year trek to the edge of the solar system.

The New Horizons spacecraft left Earth in January 2006 and has traveled about 2.9 billion miles (4.6 billion kilometers) on its way to study Pluto and its largest moon Charon, a few smaller moons and more objects in the Kuiper Belt. The mission has already captured images of Pluto and Charon, but nothing like what it will see on its closest approach in July 2015.​
(Space.com)


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

*It's official - New Horizons probe has awakened.... Pluto, here we come!*


----------



## SINC (Feb 16, 2001)

This kind of accomplishment continues to boggle the mind that man can be so exacting in accuracy over billions of miles as to pinpoint a tiny object right where they want it. I look forward to what we learn about our tiniest planet.


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

*Very sweet gesture... the man who discovered Pluto is along for the ride...*

*Clyde’s flying to Pluto*

_Clyde Tombaugh was only 24 years old when he discovered Pluto on February 18, 1930. Tombaugh, who hailed from Kansas, sent drawings of Mars and Jupiter he’d made with his homemade 9-inch telescope to the astronomers at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona for their advice. They were so impressed with the amateur astronomer’s talent, they hired Clyde and put him to work on the Planet X project. The observatory’s founder, Percival Lowell, had predicted a planet beyond Neptune based on small irregularities in its motion. Lowell named the mysterious object Planet X._

* * *​_On February 18, 1930, he discovered a possible moving object in the constellation Gemini on plates taken on January 23 and 29 earlier that year. It was later confirmed as a small planet far beyond Neptune. Pluto had been found!

The name Pluto was suggested by an 11-year-old girl named Venetia Burney in Oxford, England._

* * *​_When New Horizons swings by Pluto for an in-depth look on July 14, 2015, a little bit of Clyde will be on board. A small cannister containing a portion of his ashes is affixed to the spacecraft._

(AstroBob)


----------



## Macfury (Feb 3, 2006)

That's one hell of a Dobsonian!


----------



## SINC (Feb 16, 2001)

That's way cool, CM, thanks for the heads up.


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

*It's getting cloooooosssseerrrrr!!!!!! * 



(New Horizons Mission Page / Multimedia)


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

*New photo - 14 April 2015 - in colour!* 










For those online now, there's a NASA webcast on the Pluto Mission.


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

*Excellent - NASA has published a Raw Images page for the New Horizons / Pluto mission:
*
New Horizons SOC

This is all you get at the moment - but over the next few weeks, boy-o-boy, this will be the place to visit for any Pluto fanatics...










(NASA)


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

The latest image from the LORRI camera: Pluto & Charon










Ralph coming online too


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

The latest image posted for June 29th: You can see quite clearly (?) a pretty massive crater on Pluto in the bottom-right quadrant — it looks sort of like the one on Mimas:

*Pluto:*









*Mimas*:









*Or perhaps......?*


----------



## Dr.G. (Aug 4, 2001)

Amazing pictures, CM. Still, a Death Star??????????????????


----------



## SINC (Feb 16, 2001)

Very cool shots, CM. Great stuff! :clap:


----------



## Dr.G. (Aug 4, 2001)

Seeing double on the Eve of Canada Day! | CTV Atlantic News

A nice view tonight with the naked eye.


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

_Just -_ *WOW* _- and we're still a loooong ways away from the best images to come!_


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

*Uh-oh... glitch!*

_July 5, 2015_
*New Horizons Plans July 7 Return to Normal Science Operations*

NASA's New Horizons mission is returning to normal science operations after a July 4 anomaly and remains on track for its July 14 flyby of Pluto.

The investigation into the anomaly that caused New Horizons to enter "safe mode" on July 4 has concluded that no hardware or software fault occurred on the spacecraft. The underlying cause of the incident was a hard-to-detect timing flaw in the spacecraft command sequence that occurred during an operation to prepare for the close flyby. No similar operations are planned for the remainder of the Pluto encounter.

"I'm pleased that our mission team quickly identified the problem and assured the health of the spacecraft," said Jim Green, NASA's Director of Planetary Science. "Now - with Pluto in our sights - we're on the verge of returning to normal operations and going for the gold."

Preparations are ongoing to resume the originally planned science operations on July 7 and to conduct the entire close flyby sequence as planned. The mission science team and principal investigator have concluded that the science observations lost during the anomaly recovery do not affect any primary objectives of the mission, with a minimal effect on lesser objectives. "In terms of science, it won't change an A-plus even into an A," said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder.

Adding to the challenge of recovery is the spacecraft's extreme distance from Earth. New Horizons is almost 3 billion miles away, where radio signals, even traveling at light speed, need 4.5 hours to reach home. Two-way communication between the spacecraft and its operators requires a nine-hour round trip.

Status updates will be issued as new information is available.


----------



## Macfury (Feb 3, 2006)

I think it was Abraham Lincoln sitting in a chair that got in the way of the camera.


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

You suspect a Savage Curtain has been cast over Pluto, MF? 





+
YouTube Video









ERROR: If you can see this, then YouTube is down or you don't have Flash installed.


----------



## Macfury (Feb 3, 2006)

You never know when you'll run into a creature like living rock with heavy foreclaws.


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

*New Horizons is back in action - closest approach a week away!*



After a more than nine-year, three-billion-mile journey to Pluto, it’s showtime for NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, as the flyby sequence of science observations is officially underway.

In the early morning hours of July 8, mission scientists received this new view of Pluto—the most detailed yet returned by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) aboard New Horizons. The image was taken on July 7, when the spacecraft was just under 5 million miles (8 million kilometers) from Pluto, and is the first to be received since the July 4 anomaly that sent the spacecraft into safe mode.

This view is centered roughly on the area that will be seen close-up during New Horizons’ July 14 closest approach. This side of Pluto is dominated by three broad regions of varying brightness. Most prominent are an elongated dark feature at the equator, informally known as “the whale,” and a large heart-shaped bright area measuring some 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) across on the right. Above those features is a polar region that is intermediate in brightness.

“The next time we see this part of Pluto at closest approach, a portion of this region will be imaged at about 500 times better resolution than we see today,” said Jeff Moore, Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team leader of NASA’s Ames Research Center. “It will be incredible!”​
(NASA/JPL)


----------



## SINC (Feb 16, 2001)

Why the U.S. Postal Service is excited about NASA’s mission to Pluto - The Washington Post


----------



## machspeed5 (Mar 4, 2008)

finally pluto up seen up close!...yes i need these sunglasses lol


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

*Signs of Geology (Annotated)*

Release Date: July 10, 2015
Keywords: LORRI, Pluto

Tantalizing signs of geology on Pluto are revealed in this image from New Horizons taken on July 9, 2015 from 3.3 million miles (5.4 million kilometers) away. 

The annotation indicates features described in the text, and includes a reference globe showing Pluto’s orientation in the image, with the equator and central meridian in bold. 

At this range, Pluto is beginning to reveal the first signs of discrete geologic features. This image views the side of Pluto that always faces its largest moon, Charon, and includes the so-called “tail” of the dark whale-shaped feature along its equator (The immense, bright feature shaped like a heart had rotated from view when this image was captured). 

Among the structures tentatively identified in this new image are what appear to be polygonal features; a complex band of terrain stretching east-northeast across the planet, approximately 1,000 miles long; and a complex region where bright terrains meet the dark terrains of the whale.​
*Credit:* NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute


----------



## SINC (Feb 16, 2001)

An interesting app:

NASA's Eyes: Eyes on Pluto


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

That's a cool app, SINC. I thought that app had a feature where it would alert you to when your local light conditions were equivalent to noon on Pluto...? 

*EDIT*: _Nope - not in the app. It's a webpage at NASA:_ PlutoTime

And it's worth noting, this app is for MUCH more than just Pluto - it's NASA's all-encompassing app for its current activities across the solar system.


----------



## SINC (Feb 16, 2001)

I had a sneaking suspicion you would like that one, Mark.


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

A nice read on the background of New Horizons through to present day via *Wired*:

*New Horizons' Long, Dark, Amazing Journey to Pluto...And Beyond *

_“After nine and a half years, so much is riding on the last day,” says Hal Weaver, the mission’s project scientist. “It makes for some nail-biting.” With New Horizons zipping by at 31,000 mph, a piece of debris as small as a grain of rice could punch a fatal hole in the spacecraft. So yes—nail-biting.

If all goes well, the data will begin trickling back to Earth, crossing a void so vast it will take more than four hours for each transmission to reach Maryland. A schedule of what happens exactly when fills four manuals, just one of which runs 50 pages. It’ll take more than a year for the probe to send all that data home:* the downlink speed is only two kilobits per second* and New Horizons has to share the antennas of NASA’s Deep Space Network with other spacecraft._​


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

*Closer....*



Three billion miles from Earth and just two and a half million miles from Pluto, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has taken its best image of four dark spots that continue to captivate. 

*The spots appear on the side of Pluto that always faces its largest moon, Charon—the face that will be invisible to New Horizons when the spacecraft makes its close flyby the morning of July 14*. New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado, *describes this image as “the last, best look that anyone will have of Pluto’s far side for decades to come.*”

The spots are connected to a dark belt that circles Pluto’s equatorial region. What continues to pique the interest of scientists is their similar size and even spacing. “It’s weird that they’re spaced so regularly,” says New Horizons program scientist Curt Niebur at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Jeff Moore of NASA’s Ames Research Center, Mountain View, California, is equally intrigued. “We can’t tell whether they’re plateaus or plains, or whether they’re brightness variations on a completely smooth surface.” 

The large dark areas are now estimated to be 300 miles (480 kilometers) across, an area roughly the size of the state of Missouri. In comparison with earlier images, we now see that the dark areas are more complex than they initially appeared, while the boundaries between the dark and bright terrains are irregular and sharply defined.

(NASA)


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)




----------



## Macfury (Feb 3, 2006)

It's tough to accept that this will probably be my last best look at Pluto, unless someone figures out warp drive.


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

*The best image we had of Pluto in May 2015. The best image we have on 14 June 2015:*










Tuesday morning closest flyby... going to be an agonizing wait for the probe to finish observing, then swing around to start beaming data back to earth at 2kb/sec. 

I'm with you, MF. We need Warp Drive now!!!

Pluto is on her outward orbital path - she's going to be getting farther away for quite some time... over 200 years until she's back in this position... darn eliptical orbits!


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

_Heeeeeeeeeere's Pluto! The sharpest, best image of this little world, taken at just under 700,000 km away, and the last image sent before New Horizons swung around to begin it's intense scan of Pluto and her moons as it zips past, going around 13.7 km/sec relative to Pluto. The big moment comes after *9pm EDT this evening*, when New Horizons begins to download the data collected._


----------



## fjnmusic (Oct 29, 2006)

CubaMark said:


> _Heeeeeeeeeere's Pluto! The sharpest, best image of this little world, taken at just under 700,000 km away, and the last image sent before New Horizons swung around to begin it's intense scan of Pluto and her moons as it zips past, going around 13.7 km/sec relative to Pluto. The big moment comes after *9pm EDT this evening*, when New Horizons begins to download the data collected._


It's a little planet with a big heart! Like literally, right on the front.


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

*New Horizons successfully completed its flyby of the Pluto system, it's alive, and it's transmitting data home!*

*It's Alive! New Horizons Has Survived Its Date With Pluto*


*IT’S OFFICIAL:* NEW Horizons is on the far side of Pluto. Its sensors have sensed, its hard drive is fat with data, and its radio dish is primed for tomorrow’s big downlink.

“We have a healthy spacecraft, we have recorded data of the Pluto system, and we’re outbound from Pluto,” says Alice Bowman, the mission operations manager....

* * *​
From its position in the Kuiper Belt, about 3 billion miles away, New Horizons sent a message that spent five-sixths of its four-and-a-half-hour transit time in the outer solar system. It hit a 230 foot-wide dish antenna outside Madrid, Spain—part of the Deep Space Network, that’s the DSN—at 7:53pm ET, which then forwarded the message to mission operations.

“Just like we planned it, just like we practiced. We did it,” Bowman says.

In the coming hours, days, and weeks, New Horizons will continue to send back its bounty of data, kilobit by kilobit. The pictures you’ve seen and the data you’ve read about so far are only one percent of what’s to come. And it will take about 16 months to get it all.

The first big payload will arrive in two parts, first from tomorrow morning from around 7:00am to 8:25am ET, and again from 3:25pm to 9:20pm ET. All together, they will be be something of a representative sample. Perhaps most coveted will be the glamour shots: three huge pictures from the panchromatic (read: greyscale) LORRI imager. Each pixel will represent a quarter mile—close enough to make out the lakes in Central Park, if the image was of New York.​
(Wired)

*Here's one of the last images released by the New Horizons team before the flyby, a false-colour composition showing the varying types of material found on the surfaces of Pluto and Charon:*


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

*NASA Finally Picked New Horizons' Next Destination*

NEW HORIZONS HAS a new destination! The spacecraft, as you might remember, whizzed by the former planet known as Pluto earlier this summer. NASA has now picked its next stop: a small, cold Kuiper Belt object called 2014 MU69 that is billions of miles beyond Pluto. 

Although the trip to Pluto has been carefully planned, the trip beyond has been…less so. Kuiper Belt objects at the edge of the solar system are enticing destinations because they’re made up of primitive material largely unchanged since the solar system’s birth 4.6 billion years ago. NASA had been looking for a KBO that New Horizons could visit since 2011. But none of the ground-based telescopes turned up anything that the spacecraft could reach with its remaining fuel.

With time running out, NASA finagled observation time on the Hubble Space Telescope in the summer of 2014. Then, finally, Hubble found five potential targets—eventually narrowed down to two.

2014 MU69 was known as potential target 1, or PT1, because it is easier to reach. But the other option, PT3, looked brighter in the sky, meaning it could be bigger and more interesting. “We have to weigh the risk of something barely reachable and another one that is smaller but easily reachable,”

* * *​
NASA is also teasing the possibility of an extended mission—even beyond 2014 MU69.








​(Wired)


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

*New Horizons begins massive "treasure trove" data downlink*










When NASA's New Horizons probe made its historic flyby of Pluto on July 14, it gathered a wealth of information about the dwarf planet and its moons, but at a distance from Earth of over 3 billion mi (4.8 billion km), retrieving that data will take a very long time. To speed things up, NASA has begun an intensive download from the unmanned spacecraft that will return tens of gigabits of data over the next 12 months.

Until now, New Horizons has been concentrating on lower data-rate information from its energetic particle, solar wind, and space dust instruments with only a smattering of images thrown in as insurance against systems failures, but on September 5, NASA turned the metaphorical tap open. The probe is now sending back packets of information at a relatively high rate as it starts a download of high-resolution images and other data that will take about a year.

In an age of high-speed broadband, we're used to data streaming round the world in huge amounts at incredible speeds, but even seven weeks after its encounter with Pluto, the vast majority of the data recorded by New Horizons remains locked in its memory banks. This is because New Horizons, now speeding away from Pluto and out of the Solar System, is so far away that a radio signal takes 4.5 hours to reach Earth and with only a 12-watt transmitter, it can only manage 1 to 4 kilobits per second of data, depending on how the data is sent and which Deep Space Network antenna is receiving it.

* * *​
what’s coming is not just the remaining 95 percent of the data that’s still aboard the spacecraft – it’s the best datasets, the highest-resolution images and spectra, the most important atmospheric datasets, and more. It’s a treasure trove."

NASA is making the images from New Horizon's Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) available to the public as they come in. *The first release is scheduled for September 11.*
​

(GizMag)


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

*Oh man - these are AMAZING!*

*Latest imagery from Pluto / New Horizons
*









The latest images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft have scientists stunned – not only for their breathtaking views of Pluto’s majestic icy mountains, streams of frozen nitrogen and haunting low-lying hazes, but also for their strangely familiar, arctic look.

This new view of Pluto’s crescent – taken by New Horizons’ wide-angle Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC) on July 14 and downlinked to Earth on Sept. 13 – offers an oblique look across Plutonian landscapes with dramatic backlighting from the sun. It spectacularly highlights Pluto’s varied terrains and extended atmosphere. The scene measures 780 miles (1,250 kilometers) across.

“This image really makes you feel you are there, at Pluto, surveying the landscape for yourself,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado. “But this image is also a scientific bonanza, revealing new details about Pluto’s atmosphere, mountains, glaciers and plains.”

Owing to its favorable backlighting and high resolution, this MVIC image also reveals new details of hazes throughout Pluto’s tenuous but extended nitrogen atmosphere. The image shows more than a dozen thin haze layers extending from near the ground to at least 60 miles (100 kilometers) above the surface. In addition, the image reveals at least one bank of fog-like, low-lying haze illuminated by the setting sun against Pluto’s dark side, raked by shadows from nearby mountains.​
(Full story at New Horizons)​


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

*New hi-res photo of Charon just released!*


----------



## eMacMan (Nov 27, 2006)

Interesting in that most of the crater impacts seem to hit one side. Perhaps the lighting just makes them more obvious there.


----------



## Macfury (Feb 3, 2006)

I'm actually surprised by the amount of light and shadow. I had no real concept of the sun's influence at a billion miles.


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

*Loving this continual stream of new Pluto material... which will continue for the next year!*










*'Snakeskin' Terrain
*
_Release Date: September 24, 2015
Keywords: MVIC, Pluto, Ralph_

In this extended color image of Pluto taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, rounded and bizarrely textured mountains, informally named the Tartarus Dorsa, rise up along Pluto's day-night terminator and show intricate but puzzling patterns of blue-gray ridges and reddish material in between. This view, roughly 330 miles (530 kilometers) across, combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC) on July 14, 2015, and resolves details and colors on scales as small as 0.8 miles (1.3 kilometers).​
(NASA—New Horizons)


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

*Does Pluto Have Ice Volcanoes?*








Jeff Moore of NASA’s Ames Research Center showed pictures of mountains lined with deep craters at their centers. This suggests—if not proves—volcanoes. These objects are at least 5 kilometers high, and look strikingly like the volcanoes on Mars.

Oliver White of SETI joked that ice volcanoes are the “least weird” hypothesis to explain much of what we see.

* * *​
Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, make a double system: they both orbit a spot in empty space between them, and their gravity makes them always face each other. However, Charon looks strikingly different than Pluto, and is in its own way as weird and wonderful as the dwarf planet itself.

Charon is two-faced. The northern hemisphere is rough and jumbled, with a huge region informally known as Mordor Macula, colored by tholins. The southern hemisphere is much smoother, with a fissure dividing north from south. The current hypothesis is that Charon and Pluto were both born out of a body that was shattered by an impact early in history, which is also how the Moon was created.

* * *​
Charon and other large moons of the Solar System steal the spotlight, but there are a lot more small potato-shaped moons. Pluto has four: Nix, Hydra, Styx, and Kerberos. These moons make a miniature Solar System around Pluto and Charon.

“It’s not chaos. It’s pandemonium,”

* * *​
Perhaps the big impact years ago that created Charon also made the other moons, along with at least one other moon that got kicked out of the system. A secondary impact would also spin Hydra up to its current fast rate.

New Horizons flew by Pluto in July, but to save weight and cost, the antenna to transmit data back to Earth is small. As a result, only about 20 percent of the data the probe took has arrived at Earth.​
(DailyBeast)


----------



## SINC (Feb 16, 2001)

NASA scientists shocked by what they found on Pluto’s surface


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

Wow. 

*New Horizons Just Sent the Sharpest Pluto Photos It Can Get*

Over the last few months, New Horizons has continued to send back images of Pluto from its closest July flyby of the dwarf planet. They’re amazing. But today’s releases put them all to shame. These images—the first in a series of high-res shots NASA will release in the coming weeks—are the sharpest humans will ever see of Pluto’s surface. That is, until explorers send another probe out toward the Kuiper belt.​







The black and white images (from LORRI) might look plain at first glance, but really take the time to dive into that image: If you look carefully, you can see some incredible details. In the impact-ridden area north of the mountain range, some craters seem to have multiple layers—relics of different geological ages, perhaps, hidden in Pluto’s icy crust. And Sputnik Planum’s flats, on closer inspection, aren’t so pristine. The plain is pockmarked with ridges of different sizes, like ripples left in sand as the tide goes out.​
(Wired)


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

*Exclusive photos: Clouds seen on Pluto for first time*








_The New Horizons spacecraft, which flew past Pluto last July, may have discovered clouds hovering above the surface, New Scientist can exclusively reveal.

Images released publicly (see bottom image) by the New Horizons team have already shown off Pluto’s surprisingly complex atmosphere, featuring many layers of haze rising above icy mountains. But in emails and images seen by New Scientist, researchers on the mission discuss the possibility that they have spotted individual clouds, pointing to an even richer atmospheric diversity._​
(More at New Scientist)


----------



## tilt (Mar 3, 2005)

Pardon my ignorance, but is Pluto back again to being a planet? I remember it was banished from planet-dom a while ago.

Cheers


----------



## Dr.G. (Aug 4, 2001)

tilt said:


> Pardon my ignorance, but is Pluto back again to being a planet? I remember it was banished from planet-dom a while ago.
> 
> Cheers


The debate still rages within the astronomy community.


----------



## Macfury (Feb 3, 2006)

I never accepted Pluto's demotion.


----------



## Dr.G. (Aug 4, 2001)

Macfury said:


> I never accepted Pluto's demotion.


Nor did I, mon ami. Power to the People .............. and their planets.


----------



## eMacMan (Nov 27, 2006)

Macfury said:


> I never accepted Pluto's demotion.


Pluto failed to march to the New World Order tune. It refused to be assimilated nad has therefore been demoted. Step in time or you too may suffer a similar fate, by order of GWB and Co.


----------



## fjnmusic (Oct 29, 2006)

Pluto has been around since long before humans emerged from the primordial soup to classify things, and it will be around long after we're a distant memory. I'm sure Pluto doesn't really care what we call it. 


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

*Pluto Is Emitting X-Rays, and That's Really Weird*









(Pluto, as seen by the Chandra X-ray telescope)​
Something very strange is going on around Pluto. The icy world that sits some 3.6 billion miles from the sun appears to be emitting x-rays—high energy radiation associated with gases with temperatures of a million degrees. That makes Pluto the furthest known x-ray source in our solar system. If confirmed, the finding could reshape our understanding of the dwarf planet’s atmosphere.

Before we’d seen Pluto up close, most astronomers imagined it to be a dead little nugget of ice and rock. But as the New Horizons spacecraft got closer, it started detecting signs of an atmosphere. This got Scott Wolk of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics wondering if Pluto might be visible in the x-ray part of the spectrum.

“The idea is that if the sun is emitting high energy particles, and those high energy particles hit cold gas, the atomic interactions will create an x-ray glow from a planet that we can see,” Wolk told Gizmodo.

Although this theory had been proven on nearby comets more than a decade earlier, most astronomers believed that Pluto was way too far from the sun to produce a detectable x-ray glow.​
(Gizmodo)


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

*Good Boy, Pluto...NASA's New Horizons Sent The Last Bit Of Data From Pluto*

NASA now has all the science data that the New Horizons spacecraft gathered of Pluto and its moons over a year ago. Early in the morning on October 25th, the vehicle sent back the last bit of the more than 50 gigabits of information it collected during its flyby of Pluto in July 2015. It marks a big milestone for the New Horizons mission, as the team prepares for the spacecraft’s next flyby of any icy space rock.

It’s taken 15 months for New Horizons to send back all of its Pluto flyby data—a process that was always meant to be slow. The mission team designed New Horizons so that it could store as much information about Pluto as quickly as possible. So in order to fit big enough memory banks on the vehicle, the communications system was a little less robust than previous spacecraft systems.​
(More at: SatNews)

*New Horizons* is currently speeding outward, heading to its rendezvous with Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69, anticipated rendezvous on New Year's Day 2019. (Details)


----------



## yeeeha (Feb 16, 2007)

CubaMark said:


> *Good Boy, Pluto...NASA's New Horizons Sent The Last Bit Of Data From Pluto*


Watch the YouTube video in the official news release to find out the details why it has taken such a long time to transmit all the data back to Earth.


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

_In case any of you thought New Horizons as finished after the Pluto flyby... hang on to your hats!_

*NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft Captures Its First Photo of Ultima Thule, Its Next Target*










Though it’s still 107 million miles from its target, the New Horizons spacecraft has caught a first glimpse of Ultima Thule, a mysterious Kuiper Belt object.

With Pluto now firmly in its rearview mirror, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is steadily chugging towards Ultima Thule, a Kuiper Belt object located, on average, about 44 AU from the Sun (one AU is the average distance of the Earth to the Sun). By comparison, Pluto’s orbit is around 33.63 AU.

On August 16, and at a distance of 107 million miles from Ultima Thule, New Horizons used its telescopic Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) to snap four dozen images. The data was transmitted back to Earth, where NASA scientists, to their delight, managed to create a composite image and discern the dim object from all the background noise produced by stars. Happily, the location of Ultimate Thule, or (486958) 2014 MU69 as it’s officially known, was exactly where NASA scientists had predicted. That means New Horizons is right on track.

* * *​
This picture is significant for several reasons.

First and foremost, it’s super cool—it’s an actual photograph of a 19-mile-wide (30-kilometer) object located 4 billion miles (6.5 billion kilometers) from Earth. Secondly, these images are now the most distant ever taken from Earth (New Horizons just broke its own record). And lastly, New Horizons proved that it’s now able to visually detect its target, which means mission planners can adjust the spacecraft’s trajectory if needed. According to NASA’s itinerary, New Horizons will zoom past Ultima Thule on January 1, 2019 (yep, New Year’s Day) at 12:33 a.m. EST. (It boggles the mind to think that, after traveling for billions of miles, NASA knows its its arrival time down to the minute....

(Gizmodo)​


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

Just a couple of hours until New Horizons flies past Ultima Thule (currently less than the distance between the earth and the moon). But it will be hours until the spacecraft finishes observations and rotates to turn its antennas toward earth, to send us its discoveries. NASA press conference scheduled for sometime after 11:00am EST on New Year's Day....


----------



## SINC (Feb 16, 2001)

Thanks for the reminder as I would like to catch that event. And Happy New Year to you and yours Mark.


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

Ladies and Gentlemen, _Ultima Thule_:


----------



## CubaMark (Feb 16, 2001)

Size comparison with Pluto:


----------

