New Horizons Pluto Mission update thread

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

Close up of @BiggieShady 's pic

 

[rtwjunkie]

Close up of @BiggieShady 's pic


View attachment 66506

Oh look, I see an alien base in that crater....LOL!

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

Pluto's atmosphere

Meanwhile, we’ve started sniffing nitrogen escaping from Pluto. Our models anticipated we’d start detecting traces of the atmosphere about a day out from closest approach, but instead we started picking up traces a full five days away. That time difference equates to much farther away: the probe started picking up ionized nitrogen at around 6 million kilometers away from the dwarf planet instead of the predicted 1 to 2.5 million kilometers.

The early detection of nitrogen could mean anything from the source being stronger than we thought to the atmosphere being stripped from the dwarf planet more rapidly than we’ve modelled. It could also means something more exotic, like a yet-to-be-determined process concentrating the escaped gas and our probe just coincidentally intercepting the stream. Distinguishing between the options is going to take a lot more data, during which we’ll also be learning what else is in Pluto’s atmosphere, and if Charon and Pluto actually share an atmosphere within their odd little system.


NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

 

[BiggieShady]

Oh look, I see an alien base in that crater....LOL!

Can't unsee it now, there is a huge road leading to it

 

[Ikaruga]

x86 is a very inefficient CPU architecture.

With all due respect, that's not the case anymore but it was true even very recently indeed. Some custom made new Intel technology found in tablets and mobile devices could end up in scientific "situations" in the future imo.

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
EPIC

 

[rtwjunkie]

With all due respect, that's not the case anymore but it was true even very recently indeed. Some custom made new Intel technology found in tablets and mobile devices could end up in scientific "situations" in the future imo.

True, and then ten years from now whenever a spacecraft arrives somewhere, younger versions of ourselves will be asking why we used inefficient and slow computer technology, even though we used the most current available. It will always be so.

 

[rtwjunkie]

Can't unsee it now, there is a huge road leading to it

Truly! I "see" a maglev rail-line heading underground a few miles away though.

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

Is there someone waving?

 

[dorsetknob]

Beware the Flea's of Pluto They Bite

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

Little fact
Disney’s Pluto the dog was first created in the same year that Tombaugh discovered the dwarf planet. Venetia Burnley always insisted that "The name had nothing to do with the Disney cartoon. Mickey Mouse's dog was named after the planet, not the other way around." Disney's animators believed that Walt Disney chose the name to capitalize on the sensation of the newly named planet

 

[dorsetknob]

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

This is Pluto and Charon in real colour, but exaggerated to emphasize the compositional differences. The image was taken by the New Horizons probe early in the morning of July 13 before its historic flyby.

At 3:38am on July 13, 2015, the New Horizons probe used three colour filters its Ralph instrument to capture the data for these enhanced colour images of Pluto and its largest moon Charon.
The image is real colour, but not true colour: the red filter is mapped to red and so on, but this isn’t at all what you’d see with your naked eyes. The colours have been cranked to extremes to emphasize compositional differences. This is a composite image, reducing the distance between the worlds.

Little fact
It’s looking that Charon has a much older, more battered surface than Pluto, while Pluto’s smoother surface may indicate more active processes that erase signs of its age.
the surface features on Pluto and Charon trying to pry out their geological secrets just by shape,

 

[MrGenius]

Found something cool a minute ago. They've got some informal name proposals for a few of the surface features. The pic is terrible. And I can't quite make out what they all are. The "whale" could wind up being called Cthulhu. Which I like the sounds of(seems most fitting).

The rest appear to be:

Meng-p'o

Krun

Ala

Balrog

Vucub-Came

Hun-Came

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

According to IAU rules, Pluto's moons must be named after characters associated with the underworld in Greek and Roman mythology. This connection was deemed too tenuous in the case of Vulcan (the ancient Roman god of fire and volcanoes), SETI officials said, adding that the name has also already been used in astronomy. (For example, Vulcan was a hypothetical planet once thought to orbit between Mercury and the sun.)

The IAU accepted the second- and third-place finishers in the Pluto Rocks poll, so P4 and P5 are now officially known as Kerberos (the three-headed dog that guards the gates of the Underworld) and Styx (the river separating the land of the living from that of the dead), respectively.

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

Found something cool a minute ago. They've got some informal name proposals for a few of the surface features. The pic is terrible. And I can't quite make out what they all are. The "whale" could wind up being called Cthulhu. Which I like the sounds of(seems most fitting).
View attachment 66517

The rest appear to be:

Meng-p'o

Krun

Ala

Balrog

Vucub-Came

Hun-Came

google those words. i doubt any of those would be used.

@MrGenius link to the place you found it please

 

[MrGenius]

I found it by clicking the google doodle, and then the first link at the top of the page. But it ended up being sourced from here: https://twitter.com/StocktonSays/status/621022068252012544/photo/1

The New, Nerdy Mythology of Pluto’s Place Names
Once you have pictures of a never-before-seen-up-close almost-planet, you have to start naming what you see. And according to an image of from the New Horizons press room that our correspondent Nick Stockton tweeted earlier today, the Plutonians have started naming their surroundings…informally.

The names are all related to various mythologies of the underworld, appropriately enough. They also suggest that some of these researchers are pretty darn nerdy—though some of the names seem to have come from votes people submitted online during New Horizons’ flight.

Like, for example, “Cthulu,” the name of an elder god from the fiction of HP Lovecraft. Or what about “Balrog,” the name of the monster that seemingly killed Gandalf the Grey in the Lord of the Rings trilogy? Meng-p’o is the Buddhist goddess of forgetfulness and amnesia—she lives in the underworld. Hun-Came and Vucub-Came are Mayan death gods.

We thought at first that Krun was a reference to a Non-Player Character from the hellfire peninsula in World of Worldcraft, but he’s actually one of five lords of the underworld for the Mandaeans, an ancient religion from the Iraq-Iran region. (His nickname is “Mountain-of-Flesh.”) Ala is an underworld and harvest goddess of the Ibo people of eastern Nigeria.

Pluto might not technically be a planet, but it has some great place-names.

Above directly quoted from this article.

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

Here is a good start to naming features on Pluto.....(in my opinion)


Between 1901 and 2014, the Nobel Prizes and the Prize in Economic Sciences were awarded 567 times to 889 people and organizations. With some receiving the Nobel Prize more than once, this makes a total of 860 individuals and 22 organizations.

 

[haswrong]

According to IAU rules, ................., respectively.

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

According to IAU rules, Pluto's moons must be named after characters associated with the underworld in Greek and Roman mythology

those are features not moons

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

The solar system contains dozens of objects that are large enough for self-gravity to make them round, and yet are not considered planets. They include the major moons of the planets, one asteroid, and many worlds in the Kuiper belt. The ones that we have visited with spacecraft are shown here to scale with each other. A couple of items on here are not quite round, illustrating the transition to smaller, lumpier objects


Pluto is on here just to be topical because as we all know Pluto is a planet

Montage by Emily Lakdawalla.

 

[rtwjunkie]

The solar system contains dozens of objects that are large enough for self-gravity to make them round, and yet are not considered planets. They include the major moons of the planets, one asteroid, and many worlds in the Kuiper belt. The ones that we have visited with spacecraft are shown here to scale with each other. A couple of items on here are not quite round, illustrating the transition to smaller, lumpier objects


Pluto is on here just to be topical because as we all know Pluto is a planet

Montage by Emily Lakdawalla.

I think it's funny that whoever did the illustration (which is very good btw), called our moon "The Moon", maybe not realizing that it too has a name: Luna.

 

[dorsetknob]

I think it's funny that whoever did the illustration (which is very good btw), called our moon "The Moon", maybe not realizing that it too has a name: Luna.

Luna is the Latin name for the Moon
Luna (goddess), the ancient Roman divine personification of the Moon

latin not widely spoken now

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

CAPSLOCKSTUCK recumbus est.

Goodnight Pluto

 

[Ikaruga]

I think it's funny that whoever did the illustration (which is very good btw), called our moon "The Moon", maybe not realizing that it too has a name: Luna.

Iirc - in English astronomy - whatever you start with the capital letter means it's "ours", like there are galaxies, but the Galaxy == Milky way, there are suns but the Sun is the sun of the Solar system, even we could also call it Sol...etc. (This could have been changed tho, I read it a very long time ago.)