Pluto image revealed by Nasa offers closest look yet at dwarf planet | Hacker News Reader

Pluto image revealed by Nasa offers closest look yet at dwarf planet

theguardian.com

124 pointsdaegloe30 comments

Non-blogspam link: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20...

Just because it is the guardian does not mean it is not blogspam. They do not add enough info to the original article IMHO.

Thanks, this link is much easier to consume, and the original photos have even more resolution.

Yuggoth... is a strange dark orb at the very rim of our solar system... There are mighty cities on Yuggoth—great tiers of terraced towers built of black stone... The sun shines there no brighter than a star, but the beings need no light. They have other subtler senses, and put no windows in their great houses and temples... The black rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious cyclopean bridges—things built by some elder race extinct and forgotten before the beings came to Yuggoth from the ultimate voids—ought to be enough to make any man a Dante or Poe if he can keep sane long enough to tell what he has seen...

—H. P. Lovecraft, "The Whisperer in Darkness" (courtesy of the Wikipedia page on Yuggoth, aka Pluto).

> The sun shines there no brighter than a star

Worth noting though that the Sun looks a lot brighter than other stars from Pluto. Pluto orbits out at 40 AU, so the Sun is 40^2 = 1,600 times dimmer. In contrast, as seen from Earth, the full Moon is 400,000 time dimmer than Sun. Therefore the Sun from Pluto is about half way between the Moon and Sun on earth (on a logarithmic scale). It's roughly twilight.

NASA made a tool to help visualize daylight on Pluto by letting you know when during twilight the Earth is getting about the same amount of sunlight as Pluto does at noon.

http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/plutotime/

So Yuggoth must lie out in the Oort cloud?

Fungi from Yuggoth

http://pastebin.com/Td7u6GUc

Regarding references, I greatly wish the flyby would identify a bunch of Tzo crystals (http://wiki.uqm.stack.nl/Tzo_Crystal).

The fact that this is the clearest image we have of Pluto reminds me how little we really know about our own solar system, and how much more is out there to be discovered.

On a stellar scale Pluto might be right next to Earth, but it still 5 light-hours away, meaning roundtrip communication times from probes takes 10 hours.

On a human scale that's really, really, really far away. So it's not too surprising that we know very little about the tiny dwarf planet at the edge of our solar system.

What's a bit more disappointing is how little we know about the "ice giants". Both Uranus and Neptune have been visited only by Voyager 2.

And between them they have over 40 moons; some likely unremarkable rocks but others with observed or theorized geological activity, trace atmospheres, and unusual orbits and who knows what else.

I keep hoping for a Cassini-like mission to Uranus and/or Neptune, but so far, no luck.

Neptune is about 3 times further away than Saturn, and I believe Jupiter won't be in position for a good gravitational boost to get there for many decades. It's possible, but very very expensive.

Currently.

He was indicating that they would be receiving higher resolution images over the next 6 days unless I misunderstood him.

New Horizons will be _capturing_ higher-res images over the next several days. Bitrates are such that it will take ~1 year for the data to be transmitted to Earth.

Though I suspect some cherry shots will be among those prioritised for early transmission.

Starting to look very similar to Triton, which isn't surprising considering they are similar bodies: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/multimedia/gallery/P353171.jpg

It'll be interesting to see if Pluto also has Cryovolcanism.

Comparing the Hubble-obtained 1995 map of brightness to the latest map from New Horizons shows big differences on the surface. The only consistent feature between both maps is that the northern hemisphere is brighter -- the rest is almost completely different. That's sign of processes capable of changing the surfaces brightness on quite a rapid scale. Is it just the cycle of methane decay through UV light, or is it cryovolcanism also at work? Are there any other mechanisms that haven't been considered yet affecting the surface? Hopefully those questions will be answered "shortly" (in the following years that is).

Someone posted a 13 minute NYT video to HN:

http://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000003783764/fast-an...

I thought it was enjoyable.

They can reuse this headline every day for the next week!

For months, actually. Some of the images from the flyby won't get sent back until November!

Serious n00b question - how do spacecrafts like New Horizon transmit images back to NASA? I mean what medium of communication, what protocol etc?

Here's the current status page for the Deep Space Network:

https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html

NHPC is New Horizons. At the moment they are on one very large dish in Canberra Australia, with a data rate of 2.11 kb/sec.

There seem to be lots of space enthusiasts working on Wikipedia articles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons#Telecommunication...

http://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-tutorial-receiving-noaa-weath...

Interesting to hear that he pronounced Charon as "Sharon". How do you pronounce it?

I always pronounced it "Sharon", but apparently the Greek name is pronounced "Karon". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charon_%28mythology%29

I was wondering the same thing last night, pronunciation on Wikipedia seems to support either "Sharon" or "Karon".

(If you didn't know this, you can hover over each letter in the IPA pronunciations to see how it should sound).

Can someone explain why we don't see any background stars in those photos?

Pluto is a lot brighter than the stars at that distance, so they are underexposed (to the point of invisibility). If you look at pictures when New Horizons was farther away and Pluto therefor a lot dimmer, you'll see plenty of stars.

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