What if?

[Davis]

It’s a black and white image of Pluto. From what I understand…the imaging tools they have on the probe which have the highest resolution render the images in black and white. The coloured images are composites of the black and white with much lower resolution coloured images collaged together.

I totally know what you mean about closure. The phrase I used to memorise the planets and their order was My Vacuum Eats Marshmellow Jam Sandwhiches Under Nigel’s Pillow. It just doesn’t make sense without the Pillow part.

• This reply was modified 10 years, 9 months ago by Davis.

[PopeBeanie]

I understand that 1) the spacecraft will fly only once past Pluto, at 10 miles per second, and take a new path leaving Pluto forever; 2) it’s to fly through the orbital path of it’s moon/co-planetoid Charon to reduce the chances of getting hit by debris… so it will only ever get as close to Pluto as Charon’s orbit.

[Davis]

@Paul Ryan

It’s true that a distant fly by was the best they could pull off but it’s remarkable that it is being pulled off. They have promised us that we will still end up with a more and more spectacular image every day and during the flyby…an image with an incredible resolution (a pixel per football field I think I read).

They want to send the craft to some object in the Kuiper Belt but I’m not sure they’ve fully decided…nor can I find a short-list (if it exists).

[SteveInCO]

With as many moons as Pluto has (they keep finding more and more) they must have been scratching their heads wondering just exactly how much crap there was flying around out there, and any impact at 10 km/sec will be worse than getting hit with a rifle bullet. It was a smart move on their part. The spacecraft will be collecting daata far more quickly than it can download it to us, so it’s essential that the craft survive the flyby. (It will take about a year to get everything.)

I understand the hope and desire is to send it past another Kuiper Belt Object after Pluto. But even getting ONE of these guys in our remote cameras (and other instruments) is a hell of an achievement. Pluto is no longer a fuzzy white blob with no detail whatsoever, no bigger than any star, on a black photograph, which is all we had when I was a kid.

[SteveInCO]

@Davis, Oh and I should point something else out. Charon, as seen from Pluto, is 7.5 times the diameter of the full moon as seen from Earth. It would look MUCH larger than seven and a half times as big, because the area of the disc in the sky is proportional to the square of that number, so it would appear 56+ times the size of the full moon.

• This reply was modified 10 years, 9 months ago by SteveInCO.

[PopeBeanie]

oh, 10 km/sec… guess i meant to think then write 6 miles/sec.

[SteveInCO]

Either way, you don’t want to smack into some small fleck of something or other at the speed in question.

A typical rifle bullet is well under one mile per second, I typically see numbers like 3000 feet per second for a round like .308 (7.62×51 is near equivalent).

[Davis]

@SteveInCo

Chiron, from Pluto’s surface looks 57 times large than the moon viewed from Earth.

That is incredible…the sky would look so uuuuuuuuuuuuterly surreal. I’m sure if intelligent life were to have evolved there, they would have treated Chiron as much more of a tangible/subjectifiable object than early man did with the moon and sun…considering they could see the curvature of Charon (I’m assuming) and that the Sun is hardly as fierce or magnificent on Pluto than on Earth.

[SteveInCO]

Total solar eclipses wouldn’t be nearly as magnificent, either.

It’s difficult in the extreme to imagine life evolving on Pluto’s surface (it absolutely would not have any kind of biochemistry) but there is a significant chance that it once had an under-the-ice ocean like Europa does, given that before Pluto/Chiron became tidally locked the heating generated must have been intense (and there is also some effect from radioactive decay.

In fact, the article I was reading, several months old, raised the possibility that that under-ice liquid layer might still exist! Alas, no chance any critters under there would ever see Charon unless they evolved to intelligence and were able to mount an expedition to the surface.

[Davis]

@SteveInCo: You never know…a bizzare aqua space rocket might thrash through the ice and come say hello. I think the betting odds on this with a london book keeper would be about 1,000,000,000,000…which is worse odds than Jamaica winning the next world cup…but you know…imagination and stuff.

[Davis]

Check out this video (been doing the rounds on social media).

Animation of the Sun and planets as they revolve around the Sun, the sun revolves around the centre of the galaxy (as well as deviations) and as the galaxy moves relative to other galaxies.

Nassim Haramein has woo-meistered the video to fit his toxic steaming bullshit. Helarious and irritating at the same time.

• This reply was modified 10 years, 9 months ago by Davis.

[Matt]

@Davis That video appears to be woo to begin with. See here. So I’m not surprised other woo-masters are re-woo-ing it for their own woo.

[Davis]

Indeed Matt. It is bunk. Oops. My mistake.

• This reply was modified 10 years, 9 months ago by Davis.

[SteveInCO]

It would be cool to see such a video properly done, based on actual science. Alas, I haven’t any skill whatsoever in this area.

I saw one web page that tried to explain the earth’s orbit, and precession of the equinoxes, with respect to the plane of the galaxy, using animations. Unfortunately the point of view of the animations was itself orbiting the sun (or, alternately, the diagram was rotating while you watched it), and that was never stated, so one would see added rotations in the graphic that made no damned sense. (Hint, don’t try to talk about rotations in a frame of reference that is itself rotating, if you want to be clear!) It took me five or six views of it to realize that the producer of the video was either trying to obfuscate things, or just made some profoundly stupid choices.

[Davis]

Sharper b/w image of Pluto. 16 hours to go! An a mere trifflimng 800,000km to trek.

• This reply was modified 10 years, 9 months ago by Davis.
• This reply was modified 10 years, 9 months ago by Davis.

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