

New Horizons Will Have Little Time to Measure Pluto’s Atmosphere - omnibrain
http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/astrophysics/after-a-9-year-voyage-new-horizons-will-have-little-time-to-measure-plutos-atmosphere

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dakr
Just last night the SOFIA Observatory observed Pluto during an occultation
[1], a very rare event. The main purpose is to help characterize Pluto's
atmosphere and, along with New Horizons, the data will help calibrate future
Earth-based observations of Pluto.

[1] [http://www.nasa.gov/feature/sofia-in-the-right-place-at-
the-...](http://www.nasa.gov/feature/sofia-in-the-right-place-at-the-right-
time-for-pluto-observations)

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eganist
Before anybody opines with "How could Pluto have an atmosphere when it's less
massive than the moon (which has no atmosphere)?", it's worth noting that the
moon does in fact have an atmosphere.

Interestingly, NASA speculates that Pluto's surface pressure is around 3 µbar,
whereas they state that the moon's surface pressure at night is dramatically
less than that, at 3.0 × 10^-9 µbar. I'm curious to see what New Horizons'
measurements will reveal.

~~~
Osmium
Curious, but how much of an effect would temperature have on a planet's
ability to retain an atmosphere? A colder planet of equal size will presumably
be capable of maintaining a thicker atmosphere, but I'm not sure if that'd be
a significant factor in this case or not.

~~~
Sharlin
Proximity to the sun is a crucial attribute with respect to density of an
atmosphere, both due to heat input (hot molecules escape easier) and solar
wind density (energetic particles strip away molecules in collisions.)

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mattgrice
Fun fact: the new Horizons's (redundant) processors are 12MHz MIPS R3000s.

[http://blog.imgtec.com/mips-processors/mips-goes-to-
pluto](http://blog.imgtec.com/mips-processors/mips-goes-to-pluto)

I am really curious what it uses for storage. I am guessing something much
more modern, with extensive redundancy.

~~~
InclinedPlane
It uses dual redundant 8 gigabyte flash storage.

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sosuke
"With the available radio telescope time on Earth, he says, it will take about
1.5 years for the spacecraft to successfully transmit the 60 gigabits of
unique data it collected during the encounter."

Every time I hear about quantum entanglement I so desperately want instant
communication to be in our near future.

0.159 kB/s

~~~
teraflop
Quantum entanglement does not permit faster-than-light communication, even in
theory.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-
communication_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem)

~~~
mineshaftgap
Sadly even if there is intelligent life out there around other stars we are
terminally absolutely alone in the sense that we will never have anything even
remotely resembling a conversation.

~~~
icanhackit
They're waiting for us to figure out how to warp space so that we can
communicate via wormhole. They're not going to wait around for low bandwidth
high latency comms. They're not scrubs.

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bsder
Is there a reason why they didn't try to put this probe into orbit around
Pluto?

~~~
wanderingstan
It will simply be traveling too fast, and Pluto is simply too small, for the
probe to get into orbit.

For them to have arranged for it to slowly catch up with Pluto and get into
orbit, I imagine the path would have taken decades if not hundreds of years.
(Assuming the fuel capacities we have to work with.)

~~~
robryan
Looks like they have gone into some detail on a potential mission like
this[1], appears that it would take 17 years, at least with this particular
launch window Jupiter alignment.

[1] [http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/doc/PRO/ACT-RPR-PRO-
ISTS2004-Plut...](http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/doc/PRO/ACT-RPR-PRO-
ISTS2004-Pluto.pdf)

