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New Horizons Pluto Encounter
- Thread starter obeygiant
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Charon.
Wow. Just wow. Awestruck, stunned and spellbound silence.
Thanks for posting these superb pictures, @obeygiant; they are simply brilliant.
It looks like the half the crust has been "peeled off" in that latest Charon image. 
If you click the "Full Resolution" link on this news article you get a 8000x8000 pixel colour image of Pluto: The image combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC)
https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/the-rich-color-variations-of-pluto
If you click the "Full Resolution" link on this news article you get a 8000x8000 pixel colour image of Pluto: The image combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC)
https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/the-rich-color-variations-of-pluto
An interesting article on Pluto's geology: http://www.nature.com/news/pluto-s-geology-is-unlike-any-other-1.18572
Here is the best photo yet of Pluto's moon Styx:
(This pic has a resolution of 3.1km/pixel, but New Horizons will eventually download a pic of Styx with a resolution of 1.8km/pixel.)
(This pic has a resolution of 3.1km/pixel, but New Horizons will eventually download a pic of Styx with a resolution of 1.8km/pixel.)
But it doesn't look round, it looks like a potato! lolI’ll go out on a limb and predict it'll be round.
Styx is about 7km x 5km* - - I found it illuminating to overlay that size on my own neighbourhood, so I could pretend to be the Little Prince on my daily walkabouts.
(* That would be about 4 miles by 3 miles for MacRumors members living in Liberia, America, or Myanmar.)
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Terrifically interesting article; thanks for posting it @mobilehaathi - I found it fascinating.
Styx is about 7km x 5km* - - I found it illuminating to overlay that size on my own neighbourhood, so I could pretend to be the Little Prince on my daily walkabouts.
(* That would be about 4 miles by 3 miles for MacRumors members living in Liberia, America, or Myanmar.)
Always enjoyed The Little Prince, a bittersweet but thought-provoking book. And strangely apposite for what we have been privileged to see this past summer.
Brilliant; fascinating image and lovely comparison @bobob; - thanks taking the trouble to post it.
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has carried out the second in a series of four maneuvers propelling it toward an encounter with the ancient Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69, a billion miles farther from the sun than Pluto.
The targeting maneuver, performed with the spacecraft’s hydrazine-fueled thrusters, started at approximately 1:30 p.m. EDT on Sunday, Oct. 25, and lasted about 25 minutes – the largest propulsive maneuver ever conducted by New Horizons. Spacecraft operators at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, began receiving data through NASA’s Deep Space Network at approximately 8:25 p.m. EDT on Sunday that indicated a successful maneuver.
All told, the four maneuvers are designed to alter New Horizons’ path to send it toward a close encounter with MU69 on Jan. 1, 2019. The flyby would be part of an extended mission that NASA still must approve; the New Horizons team will submit a formal proposal to NASA for that mission in early 2016. The science team hopes to bring the spacecraft closer to MU69 than it came to Pluto on July 14, which was 7,750 miles (12,500 kilometers)
The two remaining KBO targeting maneuvers are scheduled for Oct. 28 and Nov. 4.
New Horizons, speeding through deep space at more than 32,000 miles per hour, is approximately 76 million miles (122 million kilometers) beyond Pluto and 3.16 billion miles (5.09 billion kilometers) from Earth. All systems are healthy and the spacecraft continues to transmit data stored on its digital recorders from its flight through the Pluto system in July.
The targeting maneuver, performed with the spacecraft’s hydrazine-fueled thrusters, started at approximately 1:30 p.m. EDT on Sunday, Oct. 25, and lasted about 25 minutes – the largest propulsive maneuver ever conducted by New Horizons. Spacecraft operators at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, began receiving data through NASA’s Deep Space Network at approximately 8:25 p.m. EDT on Sunday that indicated a successful maneuver.
All told, the four maneuvers are designed to alter New Horizons’ path to send it toward a close encounter with MU69 on Jan. 1, 2019. The flyby would be part of an extended mission that NASA still must approve; the New Horizons team will submit a formal proposal to NASA for that mission in early 2016. The science team hopes to bring the spacecraft closer to MU69 than it came to Pluto on July 14, which was 7,750 miles (12,500 kilometers)
The two remaining KBO targeting maneuvers are scheduled for Oct. 28 and Nov. 4.
New Horizons, speeding through deep space at more than 32,000 miles per hour, is approximately 76 million miles (122 million kilometers) beyond Pluto and 3.16 billion miles (5.09 billion kilometers) from Earth. All systems are healthy and the spacecraft continues to transmit data stored on its digital recorders from its flight through the Pluto system in July.
take that Australia!
Brilliant - and thanks for the visually arresting size comparison.
Thanks, too, for the update re New Horizons. Fascinating.
Thanks for the update. I hope NASA will approve the flyby of MU69.
This shot was taken when New Horizons was just 18,000 km (11,000 miles) from Pluto, just 15 minutes after closest approach. A piece of this image was released back in September, showing a part of the crescent, but after better processing this represents the whole view by the Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera in the instrument playfully called Ralph.
Source
Ridiculously huge 8,888 x 5,000 pixel version Lots of good detail to be seen in the hi-res version.
Source
Ridiculously huge 8,888 x 5,000 pixel version Lots of good detail to be seen in the hi-res version.
Such a beautiful little [dwarf] planet, isn't it?
Yes, it is - it is absolutely stunning, and astoundingly complex; I doubt that anyone expected it to be so diverse - I suspect that they assumed it would be an undistinguished blob of ice, and sent a probe (the splendid New Horizons) just to complete the ticking off of the names on the planetary list (of planets that had been visited).
Indeed, I suspect that if Pluto had already been demoted by the time that New Horizons had been launched, - and, if you look at the dates, it was a close enough run thing, - New Horizons was launched in January 2006, and Pluto demoted in August of the same year (boo, hiss) - the mission might not have taken quite the form it did.
And, yes, I am one of those still miffed at Pluto's demotion to 'dwarf' status.
When I first started reading about all of the sort of stuff, I learned the names of nine planets, their sequence, their size, their orbits, their moons, when they were discovered; my mind still thinks that there are nine - they are all deviant, not just Pluto. How many have rings, and volcanoes, and wonky moons? The whole lot of them….
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Yep. All because it doesn't clear the area around it in the Kuiper belt of debris. If I recall correctly, Pluto meets all standards for planet status except this, relatively, new definition standard.
I wonder, if the IAU would have reclassified it had it not been in the Kuiper belt. On the other hand, if it weren't, it would be expected that it did clear its orbit of debris with its gravity. An interesting pandora to contemplate..
Here's an interesting animation from NASA of the unusual rotation pattern of Pluto's moons:
That is fantastic - and would have made a superb screen saver back in the day, and a moreover, would be a screen saver that actually had a story to tell.
Thanks for posting it, @bobob - what a charming, beautifully made and most informative animation. Brilliant.
