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Pluto Flyby July 14th (photos, gifs)
[Tycho?]![[Tycho?]](https://us.v-cdn.net/5018289/uploads/userpics/934/nHG8VEMRTY5QM.gif)
As elusive as doubtRegistered User regular
As elusive as doubtRegistered User regular
Until 2015, these were the best images anybody had of Pluto, the tiny dwarf planet beyond Neptune:
Ooops, I meant this, highly optimized image taken from many many hours of observation and processing
Yeah. Pretty lame. Considering the amazing photos Hubble has given us, it may be surprising that this is the best it can do. The simple explanation is that stars and nebulae and galaxies are incredibly far away, they're also really big. Pluto is closer (but still so far it takes a beam of light over 4 hours from the sun to reach it; it reaches Earth in 8 minutes) but is tiny and dark. Hubble is as limited by the size of its lens and distance as any other telescope.
The only way to get a really good look, well that's to visit.
New Horizons
This probe was launched 9 and a half years ago (back when Pluto was still an official planet) and has been working its way closer ever since. Now its just about to arrive.
This post is basically a way for me to organize photos that I'm already look at and showing anyone within reach. We might as well talk about it too.
I took these images from Phil Plaits Bad Astronomy blog, worth reading for anyone into this sort of thing. Look how we can see the moons around Pluto.
Moons optimized:
But look how rough the original image is. Taking photos from millions of kms away, then beaming them back billions of km to earth is no easy business. There is a lot of processing that is done on a lot of these images to improve and get information out of them.
Here is a sample of images as the resolution has increased.
April
May
June
June 29
July
July 7th:
July 9th
10th
12th
12th (Charon)
13th
14th
Since New Horizons is approaching Pluto at around 14km/s (very fast), the image quality will really start to shoot up in the coming days. The closest approach happens on July 14th. We'll only get the best images about a week or so later, as the probe is too busy taking photos and measurements to bother beaming stuff back to Earth. Still, we'll be seeing regular updates of a brand new world, that nobody has yet laid eyes on. This doesn't happen very much, and I am very excited for it.
Ooops, I meant this, highly optimized image taken from many many hours of observation and processing
Yeah. Pretty lame. Considering the amazing photos Hubble has given us, it may be surprising that this is the best it can do. The simple explanation is that stars and nebulae and galaxies are incredibly far away, they're also really big. Pluto is closer (but still so far it takes a beam of light over 4 hours from the sun to reach it; it reaches Earth in 8 minutes) but is tiny and dark. Hubble is as limited by the size of its lens and distance as any other telescope.
The only way to get a really good look, well that's to visit.
New Horizons
This probe was launched 9 and a half years ago (back when Pluto was still an official planet) and has been working its way closer ever since. Now its just about to arrive.
This post is basically a way for me to organize photos that I'm already look at and showing anyone within reach. We might as well talk about it too.
I took these images from Phil Plaits Bad Astronomy blog, worth reading for anyone into this sort of thing. Look how we can see the moons around Pluto.
Moons optimized:
But look how rough the original image is. Taking photos from millions of kms away, then beaming them back billions of km to earth is no easy business. There is a lot of processing that is done on a lot of these images to improve and get information out of them.
Here is a sample of images as the resolution has increased.
April
May
June
June 29
July
July 7th:
July 9th
10th
12th
12th (Charon)
13th
14th
Since New Horizons is approaching Pluto at around 14km/s (very fast), the image quality will really start to shoot up in the coming days. The closest approach happens on July 14th. We'll only get the best images about a week or so later, as the probe is too busy taking photos and measurements to bother beaming stuff back to Earth. Still, we'll be seeing regular updates of a brand new world, that nobody has yet laid eyes on. This doesn't happen very much, and I am very excited for it.
[Tycho?] on
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Yeah it seems to have a ton of variety on its surface features. I bet there will be plenty of surprises. And Charon too we'll get to see in good resolution. Oh am I ever pumped.
And those features! Wish it wouldn't take another couple decades just to get a probe out there to map them out.
You're in luck! The eventual resolution will be around 500 times greater than the July 7th image. We'll be able to see craters or mountains or canyons or geysers of whatever. Though, we won't be able to see that sort of detail over the whole of the planet, mostly just the side facing the probe during the closest approach. We'll also get some great images of the moon Charon.
I think that was the atmosphere (if one is present). The rush to get the mission launched on-time was to get there before whatever tenuous atmosphere froze back to the surface for the 120-year or so long fall and winter.
Its pretty thoroughly frozen right now; its probably mostly water ice.
I think what you're thinking of its nitrogen atmosphere freezing, which happens at less than -200C I believe, and I think this might vary over Pluto's year. Even without the nitrogen there's probably frozen CO2 and the like.
So be careful when skiing. Your skis should be pre-chilled to ultra low temperatures. If they're human temperature, then they'd instantly vaporize the ice they touched, giving you, uh, an extra push.
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Screw that. I don't want Reapers to be a real thing.
Just remember the Charon relay was is covered in ice hundreds of kilometres thick. So if we don't see it, all is not yet lost.
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Well, seeing as Pluto is something less than 20% the mass of the moon and around 70% its diameter, I'd bet it can have satellites in much tighter orbits than one would expect.
Yeah just how close they were together really struck me as well, it was messing with my sense of scale.
So I put in an image of earth, to scale:
edit: so you could fly from Pluto to Charon and cover around the distance you'd cover when you fly from the US to China.
Well we wouldn't be around to post about it.
I'll hazard some uneducated guesses that may or may not be anywhere near the mark.
I'd imagine Pluto would be shredded by Earth's gravity, and probably wind up smeared across Earth's surface. That process would dump a lot of energy into the atmosphere, which is problematic in a global firestorm sort of way. Earth's center of gravity would change. This would alter Earth's orbit, spin, and probably the Moon's orbit as well. Just bad news all around.
Typo? The flyby will be on July 14th.
Incidentally, that is also the stated time for the next update to the XKCD blog "what if". Give the awesome cover XKCD did on the Philae landing (http://xkcd1446.org/#144), I'm quite excited about this update!
Feel free to correct me if I'm horribly wrong, but some factoid I read somewhere claimed that the distance between Earth and the moon is enough to fit all the other planets in the solar system inbetween them.
Though doing that would be a Bad Idea.
Because I'm a big stupid moron. Fixed.
That's true, if you placed them all end-to-end they would just barely fit.
I did some rough numbers last night. Assuming Pluto had zero velocity and was sitting on the surface, it would have a gravitational potential energy of around 10^29J, or around 100 trillion megatonnes equivalent. Calculated by E= mgh/2, where E is energy in Joules, m is mass of Pluto = 10^22kg, g is surface gravity = 9.8m/s^2, h is height, to Plutos center of mass, so its radius of 1184000m. This is a lot, but now blow up the entire earth lot.
Pluto would kinda... flow, from its sphere shape into a blob as it falls onto the earth (and as the earth's crust is crushed beneath it). Earthquakes, tsunamis, shock waves would be enormous and ongoing, since it'd take a while for Pluto to settle.
Speaking of that, Plutos super chilled state would have its temperature raised very violently. Solid CO2, nitrogen, water ice would be vaporized, causing its volume to increase by a factor of around 1000. A huge amount of stuff would be ejected from Pluto and would fall onto other parts of the earth. Maybe you'd even get a ring system briefly! Though the altitude is probably too low.
edits: maths
With a mass that large I don't think you can simply do mgh/2 because the gravitational force exerted by Pluto would not be negligible. I could be wrong though
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It would be awesome!
Now someone must do the math and figure out how much energy would be created if all the planets would be smooshed together like that. Enough to create a brown dwarf??
I'm no scientist, but I'm imagining all the planets being absorbed into Jupiter
I also imagine the sound would be something like "Bloop"
So, what's the betting pool on some horrifying, terrible secret finally revealed on Pluto's visible geography? Eerie face? Terrifying, open maw? Large ruins visible from space?