
Pluto image revealed by Nasa offers closest look yet at dwarf planet - daegloe
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jul/10/pluto-image-revealed-by-nasa-offers-closest-look-yet-at-dwarf-planet
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tyho
Non-blogspam link: [http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-
Article.php?page=20...](http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-
Article.php?page=20150709)

Just because it is the guardian does not mean it is not blogspam. They do not
add enough info to the original article IMHO.

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jaawn
Thanks, this link is much easier to consume, and the original photos have even
more resolution.

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tragomaskhalos
Yuggoth... is a strange dark orb at the very rim of our solar system... There
are mighty cities on Yuggoth—great tiers of terraced towers built of black
stone... The sun shines there no brighter than a star, but the beings need no
light. They have other subtler senses, and put no windows in their great
houses and temples... The black rivers of pitch that flow under those
mysterious cyclopean bridges—things built by some elder race extinct and
forgotten before the beings came to Yuggoth from the ultimate voids—ought to
be enough to make any man a Dante or Poe if he can keep sane long enough to
tell what he has seen...

—H. P. Lovecraft, "The Whisperer in Darkness" (courtesy of the Wikipedia page
on Yuggoth, aka Pluto).

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jessriedel
> The sun shines there no brighter than a star

Worth noting though that the Sun looks a lot brighter than other stars from
Pluto. Pluto orbits out at 40 AU, so the Sun is 40^2 = 1,600 times dimmer. In
contrast, as seen from Earth, the full Moon is 400,000 time dimmer than Sun.
Therefore the Sun from Pluto is about half way between the Moon and Sun on
earth (on a logarithmic scale). It's roughly twilight.

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mhurron
NASA made a tool to help visualize daylight on Pluto by letting you know when
during twilight the Earth is getting about the same amount of sunlight as
Pluto does at noon.

[http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/plutotime/](http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/plutotime/)

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JamesMcMinn
The fact that this is the clearest image we have of Pluto reminds me how
little we really know about our own solar system, and how much more is out
there to be discovered.

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jperras
On a stellar scale Pluto might be right next to Earth, but it still 5 light-
hours away, meaning roundtrip communication times from probes takes 10 hours.

On a human scale that's really, really, really far away. So it's not _too_
surprising that we know very little about the tiny dwarf planet at the edge of
our solar system.

~~~
jccooper
What's a bit more disappointing is how little we know about the "ice giants".
Both Uranus and Neptune have been visited only by Voyager 2.

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prewett
I keep hoping for a Cassini-like mission to Uranus and/or Neptune, but so far,
no luck.

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jessriedel
Neptune is about 3 times further away than Saturn, and I believe Jupiter won't
be in position for a good gravitational boost to get there for many decades.
It's possible, but very very expensive.

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InclinedPlane
Starting to look very similar to Triton, which isn't surprising considering
they are similar bodies:
[https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/multimedia/gallery/P353171.jpg](https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/multimedia/gallery/P353171.jpg)

It'll be interesting to see if Pluto also has Cryovolcanism.

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dr_zoidberg
Comparing the Hubble-obtained 1995 map of brightness to the latest map from
New Horizons shows big differences on the surface. The only consistent feature
between both maps is that the northern hemisphere is brighter -- the rest is
almost completely different. That's sign of processes capable of changing the
surfaces brightness on quite a rapid scale. Is it just the cycle of methane
decay through UV light, or is it cryovolcanism also at work? Are there any
other mechanisms that haven't been considered yet affecting the surface?
Hopefully those questions will be answered "shortly" (in the following years
that is).

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melling
Someone posted a 13 minute NYT video to HN:

[http://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000003783764/fast-
an...](http://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000003783764/fast-and-light-to-
pluto.html?smid=tw-share)

I thought it was enjoyable.

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smackfu
They can reuse this headline every day for the next week!

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idlewords
For months, actually. Some of the images from the flyby won't get sent back
until November!

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trequartista
Serious n00b question - how do spacecrafts like New Horizon transmit images
back to NASA? I mean what medium of communication, what protocol etc?

~~~
smackfu
Here's the current status page for the Deep Space Network:

[https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html](https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html)

NHPC is New Horizons. At the moment they are on one very large dish in
Canberra Australia, with a data rate of 2.11 kb/sec.

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Jun8
Interesting to hear that he pronounced _Charon_ as "Sharon". How do you
pronounce it?

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sp332
I always pronounced it "Sharon", but apparently the Greek name is pronounced
"Karon".
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charon_%28mythology%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charon_%28mythology%29)

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politician
Can someone explain why we don't see any background stars in those photos?

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prewett
Pluto is a lot brighter than the stars at that distance, so they are
underexposed (to the point of invisibility). If you look at pictures when New
Horizons was farther away and Pluto therefor a lot dimmer, you'll see plenty
of stars.

