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Pluto Flyby July 14th (photos, gifs)
Posts
They wait until the night side rotates into sunlight.
By running, duh.
Fuck, I'm disappointed. That's a shitty picture, want to see more clearly what those hexagon structures were.
Between this and Ceres, 2015 is really a landmark year of dwarf planet exploration.
This inspired another XKCD "What If" question in my mind: How effective would various sizes of nuclear weapon be as a flash for different kinds of space photography?
I always thought it would be just a ball of ice. White. Now my imagination is going crazy thinking about what could have caused that coloration.
Go nuts, might be good to provide certain examples of subjects (nebulae, comets, asteroids, perpetually shaded craters, the dark side of pluto once New Horizons passes, etc).
edit - wording
Getting some nice detail here. The large impact crater is visible in the bottom. The top of the photo shows a noticeable dark patch. There's also what looks like valleys or ridges towards the right, and a sort of notch on the top left limb.
Since we can see several craters on Charon and haven't seen many (any?) on Pluto yet, seems like Charon's surface is older. Evidence maybe for geologic activity on Pluto?
These are all just guesses btw, I don't actually know anything about this.
A+ thread
I am interested in non-horrific things as well.
I'm glad you like it.
If you were specifically looking for them, they might be very easy to spot (there's only so many ways to make a nuclear weapon after all, and during acceleration the pulses would be very regular in frequency). More advanced fusion torches would be a little harder since they're closer to stars in terms of emission wavelength. Antimatter rockets might be easier to spot though, since those might look like impossibly small supernovae.
edit: I'm also updating the OP with new pics, so you can see the quality improve over time in one post.
It's just the Spathi hiding out.
Here's a beaut already- distance between Pluto and Charon not to scale.
It's going to examine the Kuiper Belt objects after Pluto, then will probably join the Voyager satellites on their journey towards the bow shock.
as interesting as Pluto is
I'm very interested specifically looking around the Kuiper belt. It's such a shame we don't have dozens of probes out there looking for interesting stuff.
The region where the Sun's magnetic field ends and we reach the edge of interstellar space. It's part of the true boundary of the Solar System.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetopause
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bow_shocks_in_astrophysics
Basically: solar wind is the sun gushing out charged particles into space. Other stars do this too. There's a region where our suns solar wind "hits" that out interstellar space. Little is known about it.
*
Rumours are saying there's good stuff coming soon, the science team is getting excited. We'll be getting the last few things today tonight and tomorrow morning, after which it goes into full SCIENCE mode and sends stuff back tomorrow night, after the closest approach.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere
Also known as the termination shock, it's where the solar wind abruptly stops, kind of like where that outward splash from a faucet running in a sink gives way to the puddle of water.
Neat little illustration also showing the Voyager craft.
Wait, since space is 3D, wouldn't the heliosphere be well, a sphere? Or is the Sun blasting solar wind in only one direction?
The sun is near the edge of the galaxy, so the bulk of galactic solar wind is coming from one side and pushing on the heliosphere. I assume that's what the graphic is showing.
in order to get to pluto in a reasonable amount of time the craft had to be launched so fast, and be so light, there is absolutely no way it could slow down enough to get into an orbit.
You either take a hundred years to get out there or need to bring a lot of reaction mass to slow down when you do
Aside from that, I assume the heliosphere is being stretched out by the sun orbiting around the milky way galactic center of mass. Google tells me the speed is ~200 km/s (720,000 km/h, 450,000 mph)
The intent of the mission is to try and get a couple more passes of one, maybe two other objects in the kuiper belt. But they have to wait for funding of that. Otherwise it'll just be this pass and then it'll be probably just left to its own devices, which is a bit of a shame.
The other thing I learned is we are only getting 1% of the total information and photographs the probe is collecting right now, because it takes 8 hours to downlink the data and the scientific instruments can't be running when it does.
The plan is to wait until its well past pluto-charon and then download it all around september.
So there will be a glut of information soon after that.