SteveInCO

Midcourse corrections were possible and mandatory; we don’t have THAT kind of precision [The reason it’s incredible is the sheer amount of delta V it takes to get out there without any gravitational assists, which we could have done with that rocket and probe if we had to]. There are thrusters with a small supply of fuel for that purpose.…[Read more]

Hmmm, and here I thought the Unseen one emitted only neutrinos…

Lack of impact craters implies a source of heat making the surface a bit “plastic”, at least while the bombardments were happening. Or perhaps there’s another explanation.

As far as the mountains looking earthlike…well, it will certainly blow peoples mind if they turn out to have been eroded by fluids! I don’t get quite that sense though; I’m…[Read more]

Davis wrote:@steveinco by orbit I meant when it was first launched and was in orbit around the Earth for some time before it headed for Pluto…but maybe this is incorrect as well.

That sort of thing does happen, but according to Wiki, it was launched directly onto its trajectory. Various technical and weather snafus almost caused it to miss t…[Read more]

Hmmm… I’ll start with something that may seem irrelevant to that question.

There is popular confusion over the term “orbit” I think. Technically even a flyby is an “orbit”, it’s a hyperbolic one. That’s the trajectory something follows when it is moving at greater than escape velocity, and it’s symmetrical, something coming “inbound” is…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
You didn’t answer the main question: why do we need them?

I don’t have an answer, and in fact, I really don’t have a dog in this fight. 😛

http://www.slashgear.com/weve-passed-pluto-where-are-the-photos-14392922/

In particular, they updated a stamp the US issued quite some time ago.

I’ve just seen reports that New Horizons has reported home. It survived the flyby, there was no errant piece of debris in the way.

Now we get to spend sixteen months receiving copious amounts of data!

Granting, just for the sake of argument, the premise that a purebred pitbull is inherently dangerous, and also granting, just for the sake of argument, that that justifies instituting a Doggie Final Solution and killing all pitbulls, what percentage of pitbull blood is too much? Surely it’s something higher than 0.00000001 percent. Is it over…[Read more]

We are also now seeing demands that the Stone Mountain relief sculpture be removed.

On a totally different note, I am still awestruck by the fact that, almost in my lifetime (certainly in my older brother’s lifetime) we have explored all eight of the other planets. Even if Pluto got demoted, it’s still a remarkable thing. My much younger self, astronomy head that I was back in the early 70s (before anything had even flown past…[Read more]

Gregg R Thomas wrote:OK, so if you were standing on Pluto looking at Charon and saw something walking around on the surface, aimed you 308 and fired, how long would it take for the bullet to get there and how much would you have to lead the target?

Answer, you can’t do it.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/plutofact.html

The…[Read more]

Marianne wrote:Yo, Lars. I’m glad to see other Scandinavians here. My impression is that we are too content with status quo. The fact that Norway even has a Christian Party that holds seats in Parliament is a blight upon our democracy.

If I read Wiki right, they have 5.5% of the seats. One of the effects of a proportional representation s…[Read more]

I suspect that a large part of what’s going on is that the system is not fully understood. You cannot accurately model something if you don’t account for everything that effects it, and you can’t do that if you don’t even know everything that effects it.

We just saw (over in Sunday School) that someone has suggested the Sun’s sunspot cycle is…[Read more]

The latter is simply people liking to get their choices validated, and (largely, on the Mac side) wanting to feel superior to the herds of people who have Windows machines. (You see this in the Linux community as well.)

Of course that plays into a lot of peoples attitudes towards church, so I’m not sure I’ve made any sort of case against what…[Read more]

Marianne wrote:How indescribably fucked up is that?

You’ve captured it pretty well, “indescribable” or not.

Culture makes sense as a home for this sort of thing, since (if my guess is correct) they maintain all the historical relics.

It’s an often-commented-on irony that all sorts of countries in Europe with official religions, some of which…[Read more]

DrBob wrote:The peer-reviewed scripture of science is full of bad science. We don’t condemn science for that if it’s not what we’re teaching in science now. Why would we condemn religion or any other discipline if its historical writings aren’t perfect? Unless we’re fundamentalist, and we believe that absolute literal authority resides in those…

[Read more]