
‘X’ Marks a Curious Corner on Pluto’s Icy Plains - japaget
http://www.nasa.gov/feature/x-marks-a-curious-corner-on-pluto-s-icy-plains
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ChuckMcM
Reminding us once again how cool it would be if we could "easily" send robotic
probes to go and stay on various solar system "places of interest."

Something I hope that comes out of SpaceX's reusability of boosters is a way
to put a mission package into orbit, then launch a boost unit with the
necessary engine and fuel that then docks with it, and then puts it into the
necessary orbit to get to its destination.

~~~
joedrew
Pluto in particular would be a problem, though, because it is a) very small,
and b) very far away. In order to get there in a realistic time, your probe
has to be going _very quickly_; in order to stay in Pluto orbit, the probe has
to be going _very slowly_.

So, unfortunately, to stay in Pluto orbit, either you carry a lot of fuel with
you to slow down (which makes launch incredibly difficult, because you need
more fuel to accelerate the fuel you need to slow down, and then you need more
fuel to accelerate _that_ fuel, and so on), or you wait a long time to get
there.

The bigger, closer planets and planetoids, though, will see a lot more
exploration as the cost of launch decreases.

~~~
venomsnake
Or you send some self replicating stuff on the moon, build some factories and
solar panels, and build and launch robots from there. We have the technology
to do this right now if we are willing to put the money. And if we polish the
moon we could beam excess energy to earth.

~~~
japhyr
What do you mean by "polish the moon"?

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jharger
Colonize it with Polish people, of course.

~~~
fishnchips
Just make sure to send the government up there first.

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mrfusion
I think the "snail" in the middle of the picture is more curious than the x.
What is that?

~~~
japhyr
> The darker patch at the center of the image is likely a dirty block of water
> ice “floating” in denser solid nitrogen, and which has been dragged to the
> edge of a convection cell.

I love that we (the public) are still getting regular updates about what
scientists are finding from the Pluto flyby.

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sandworm101
It isn't really a capital 'X'. It looks more like the stylized, more wide than
tall, X of a spaceX landing pad.

Compare with this:[http://i.space.com/images/i/000/045/531/i02/spacex-rocket-
la...](http://i.space.com/images/i/000/045/531/i02/spacex-rocket-landing-
drone-ship.jpg?1423529560)

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kleer001
Looks to me like conditions ripe for life. Not necessarily life we're familiar
with, mind. And maybe not necessarily clicking all of the check boxes of
"Life", but structures far more interesting than dumb rocks.

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graycat
Okay, as expected, Pluto is a very cold rock. No surprise.

What the heck is NASA looking for out there, some evidence of trash left by
ET, a big, black, rectangular parallelepiped with some strange audio and
electronic signals pointing to Jupiter? Don't think they will find it.

We have to expect that in the universe, both near and far, there are a lot of
really cold rocks orbiting a lot of stars, "billions and billions". To get
something "curious" on one of those will be really rare.

Want to see what one of the really rare ones looks like? Okay, three guesses,
the first two don't count. Hint: Look at where you are standing.

IMHO, NASA needs to find some more important questions to ask.

Mars? Okay, if there is good reason to go to Mars, then, first, do a lot in
robotics: Net, send robots that can build a colony, make rocket fuel from
whatever is there on Mars, fuel a rocket, sent it back to earth successfully.
Iterate several times. Build a bigger and bigger colony that is more and more
capable. The colony should be really good, and safe for humans -- food, water,
heat, comforts, safety, etc., and a rock solid, highly reliable, very well
tested way home. Then test a lot more -- much, much more testing.

Then maybe send some humans.

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InclinedPlane
Let's review some history for the moment. Back in the 19th century "egghead"
scientists conducted numerous lines of research into several subjects which
were at the time considered to be extremely esoteric, the essence of pure,
"blue sky" research. Some examples from that century would be:
electromagnetism, particle physics, quantum mechanics, and gas laws.

As it turned out, understanding such things lead to lots of innovations which
had not been anticipated beforehand. Everything from electric motors and
lightbulbs to micro-processors, cell phones, internal combustion engines,
fertilizer, and AIDS drugs. Those innovations built on the back of once pure
scientific research have resulted in billions of years of human lives lived
that would not have been other wise, and billions of years of lives lived in
improved conditions (due to more food, cleaner water, greater wealth, and so
on), literally tens of trillions of dollars per year of added economic
activity due to those innovations and _quadrillions_ of dollars of added value
and increased wealth to human civilization. All due to egghead scientists
studying stuff just because they were curious.

What will be the next set of breakthroughs? Where will it come from? How much
value will they add? We don't know, that's why we continue to sustain and
support our curiosity across such broad ranges of subjects.

Not only might breakthroughs come from surprising directions, but I think the
scientists have more than earned it. Not everything we do needs to have some
tangible return-on-investment back to some concrete bottom line on Earth in
the near term.

~~~
graycat
Sure, but you left out some crucial parts: "Often we find that a good question
is more important than a good answer" \- Richard Bellman. IMHO pictures of
Pluto do not answer good questions.

Commonly, one of the most important steps in good research is good problem
selection. IMHO, getting pictures of Pluto is not good problem selection.

Mars? It's closer in. There we might get some clues to the formation of the
solar system. And we have a chance of setting up a base on Mars for astronomy
or whatever. Pluto? As we have long known, it's really 'out there'.

Pluto? Wild guess: There is so little going on there, and it's so darned cold,
that maybe we could use it as a source of a _preserved_ record of some of the
major events in the galaxy over the past 5 billion years or so Pluto has been
going around out there. For this guess, maybe look at the justification NASA
gave for the Pluto effort.

~~~
InclinedPlane
You seem to be missing it. Let me try to break it down again.

First off, plain and simple, we don't know what we don't know. So
straightforward it's tautological. It makes sense to expand our knowledge in
every direction possible.

This is the MO of a curious species. And curious species are vastly more
successful than incurious ones. To paraphrase Randall Munroe, the legacies of
incurious species are carefully discovered, studied, and remembered by curious
ones. Curiosity is a survival trait.

Dedicating less than 4 parts per million of our country's enormous economic
activity toward studying an important part of our stellar neighborhood seems a
worthwhile entry in the activities column of a sufficiently curious people.
Moreover, the return-on-investment on unbounded curiosity is so close to
infinite that it's hard to view complaints about such comparatively tiny
expenditures in regards to their practicality or short-term tangible returns
as anything other than laughably myopic.

~~~
graycat
> It makes sense to expand our knowledge in every direction possible.

Not quite: Instead, for any amount of money, there are, or, as we start
spending the money on research, soon will be, more candidate research projects
than money. So we have to pick and choose our research projects.

IMHO we have better candidate research projects, including just in
investigating the solar system, than getting fly-by pictures of Pluto.

Maybe NASA has some longer term ideas for research on Pluto where the recent
pictures, and maybe also just the trip there, are just the beginning. Okay,
land there, in a bunch of nitrogen snow. Take and analyze some samples and
radio the data back to earth. Maybe get some data unique and valuable data on
the formation of the solar system, maybe on some gamma ray bursts or super
nova explosions, etc. Maybe. But just the pictures? IMHO, not so good.

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chaosfox
kind of OT but, "Its surface is separated into cells or polygons 10 to 25
miles"

reminds me of glimmervoid:
[http://magiccards.info/mma/en/223.html](http://magiccards.info/mma/en/223.html)

