
New Horizons: Pluto displays rippling terrain - antouank
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-34358723
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nkozyra
I feel like we're all saying "amazing" or "incredible" but it warrants taking
a few seconds and drawing a mental picture of just how - pardon the term -
astronomical the task of getting New Horizons to Pluto is.

115 years ago we didn't really even have airplanes. Now we're taking color
photographs of something nearly 5 _billion_ miles away from Earth.

It's insane. I can't help but daydream about the insanity of 2130.

~~~
fit2rule
Facts like this always make me wonder if perhaps we, as a species, haven't
undergone some major mutation in the last 100 years or so as a result of .. I
dunno, some cosmic event or something .. to accelerate our intelligence and
understanding of the universe, and propel us so rapidly into the current state
of things. Sometimes, it sure feels like the human species took a major, major
leap somewhere .. and I wonder what it is? Sure, it can be explained
culturally - the Enlightenment, world wars, medicine, etc. But how come things
are being compelled along at an exponential rate so rapidly .. penicillin?
Electricity? All of the above? Just: whoa. The next 100 years is probably
going to be amazing ..

~~~
cmsmith
The simplest answer is probably that we stopped spending 90% of our effort as
a species on feeding ourselves. And sure, a lot of that freed up labor went to
people becoming car salesmen or yoga instructors, but a lot of it also went to
people becoming scientists and engineers.

~~~
agumonkey
A good deal of humanity also started to "believe" in science and technology.
Maybe for thousands of years people would live in spirits, gods and nature;
but since the 19th century society keeps running after progress and feeds the
research structure to do so. Think about it, until the 17th century, you'd
risk death to dare question religion.

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LesZedCB
I didn't see this link the first time, but here's a 30MB photo of the whole
surface. It's absolutely incredible!

[http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/cro...](http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/crop_p_color2_enhanced_release.png)

~~~
montecarl
I made it into a 1920x1080 wallpaper. I love high res photos of the planets
for wall papers.

[http://imgur.com/6EU8Tc4](http://imgur.com/6EU8Tc4)

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strictnein
Pluto being that red never crossed my mind. Although I'm a little unclear on
whether or not it even gets enough sun for the human eye to see that color. If
it was daytime on Pluto, would one even be able to, say, read outside?

I wonder if the light from the stars of our galaxy would provide more or less
light than the sun?

Edit: To answer my own question, Phil Plait wrote about this here:
[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/03/15/ba...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/03/15/bafact-
math-how-bright-is-the-sun-from-pluto/)

> "[on Earth] the Sun is about 400,000 times brighter than the full Moon, so
> even from distant, frigid Pluto, on average the Sun would look more than 250
> times brighter than the full Moon does from Earth"

~~~
david-given
NASA have a tool here:

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

Tell it where you live, and it'll tell you what time the light there matches
an average day on Pluto, so you can go out and try it. It's surprisingly
bright.

~~~
arethuza
Quite surprised by that - it said 7:10pm for here in Edinburgh - which is just
after sunset so still fairly bright.

~~~
arethuza
I checked at 7:10pm and perfectly easy to read a book - really not what I
would have thought at all.

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rndn
It's great seeing a big publisher like BBC linking to raw data and full
resolution images. It seems they are beginning to understand the medium.

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interdrift
Where is New Horizons headed now?What is the destination goal as "deeper into
the solar system" doesn't say precisely where? It says it is 90mil km from
Pluto.

~~~
r721
"The New Horizons mission has formally selected its next target after Pluto: a
tiny, dim, frozen world currently named 2014 MU69. The spacecraft will perform
a series of four rocket firings in October and November to angle its
trajectory to pass close by 2014 MU69 in early January 2019. In so doing, New
Horizons will become the first flyby craft to pass by a target that was not
discovered before the spacecraft launched. However, NASA has not yet committed
to keeping New Horizons operational long enough to perform science at 2014
MU69; that decision will be made next year, when numerous other solar system
extended missions are all up for review."

[http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-
lakdawalla/2015/0901160...](http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-
lakdawalla/2015/09011608-new-horizons-extended-mission-pt1.html)

~~~
lentil_soup
What does it mean it has not committed to keeping it operational? Are the
costs that high to send those signals to consider just ditching the entire
project?

~~~
r721
It means there is no decision yet, but it's very likely that the extended
mission will be approved:

"When NASA committed to build New Horizons, it committed to operate the
spacecraft and support its science team through its primary mission goal: the
Pluto encounter. NASA’s budget projections reflect this (page PS-32 in their
2016 Request, for example). You can see NASA requesting about $20 million per
year for New Horizons until 2018, at which point the requests promptly drop to
$0.

This isn’t as scary as it looks. It merely reflects that, on paper, the New
Horizons mission is only approved through the Pluto encounter, the time it
takes to downlink all of the data, and the time it would take to close out the
mission. Continued funding is approved every two years based on scientific
proposals submitted to NASA and evaluated by an independent review panel.
These are called extended missions, and nearly every science mission gets one,
owing to the fact that not scuttling a spacecraft actively returning great
science to save 0.01% of your budget is a stupidly easy case to make (for the
most part).

So while the New Horizons team must make a scientifically sound argument for
extended mission funding, it won’t be too hard to do. New Horizons was
submitted to a NASA proposal for a “Pluto Kuiper Belt Mission.” The first
planetary science Decadal Survey (which prioritizes the scientific goals in
the solar system for the decade New Horizons was launched) recommended a
mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. New Horizons itself is over-engineered
for Pluto (just like Voyager was over-engineered for Jupiter and Saturn). The
capability to reach and study a Kuiper belt object beyond Pluto is built in to
this mission, and it would be a highly embarrassing and unlikely misstep for
NASA to deny a mission extension, particularly a few months after its greatest
public outreach moment since the landing of the Curiosity rover."

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542458
Does anybody know what caused the large beige "smooth" surface feature
slightly to the right of centre in the article's large photo of the planet? I
think it forms part of the "heart" that was all over social media.

[http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/6490/production/_...](http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/6490/production/_85744752_85744751.jpg)

~~~
drabiega
That's Sputnik Planum. Supposedly it's a water/methane glacier?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_Planum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_Planum)

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hackuser
Does anyone know if this is a true or 'false' color image?

~~~
jffry
[http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/the-rich-color-
variations-...](http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/the-rich-color-variations-
of-pluto) says it's a false-color image incorporating blue + red visible light
along with infrared.

Here's a true-color image: [http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/global-mosaic-
of-pluto-in-...](http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/global-mosaic-of-pluto-in-
true-color)

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jessriedel
Incredible. Is this the highest resolution photo, in terms of smallest
resolved features, that we will receive covering all of Pluto? Or covering
just a section?

~~~
bhrgunatha
See LesZedCB's comment* for the 30MB image of the whole surface.

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10277891](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10277891)

~~~
jessriedel
No, sorry, I was actually referring to that image. I should have replied to
him.

Is that image the highest resolution?

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jonknee
And it's depressing that we're cutting the budget of stuff like New Horizons
while funneling ever more money into killing other humans.

~~~
dang
Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

We detached this comment from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10277938](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10277938)
and marked it off-topic.

~~~
hugh4
Good work!

