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New Horizons Sights Tiny Pluto Moon As Spacecraft Races Toward Dwarf Planet
universetoday.com ^ | September 15, 2014 | Elizabeth Howell on

Posted on 09/15/2014 12:40:50 PM PDT by BenLurkin

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1 posted on 09/15/2014 12:40:50 PM PDT by BenLurkin
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To: BenLurkin

A plutoon!


2 posted on 09/15/2014 12:48:09 PM PDT by Let_It_Be_So (Once you see the Truth, you cannot "unsee" it, no matter how hard you may try.)
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To: BenLurkin
I can't believe I've been waiting for a first look at pluto for nearly a decade. I'm betting on faint rings.


3 posted on 09/15/2014 12:51:32 PM PDT by cripplecreek ("Moderates" are lying manipulative bottom feeding scum.)
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To: BenLurkin
how small can they discern it's mass/spectra?
there must be a minimum size/mass.
4 posted on 09/15/2014 12:56:06 PM PDT by skinkinthegrass (The end move in politics in always to pick up a weapon...eh? "Bathhouse" 0'Mullah? d8^)
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To: cripplecreek

yeah..many “herding” moons/objects, that can’t be seen.


5 posted on 09/15/2014 12:59:01 PM PDT by skinkinthegrass (The end move in politics in always to pick up a weapon...eh? "Bathhouse" 0'Mullah? d8^)
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To: BenLurkin

How can Pluto be less than a planet if it has a moon(s)? Seems to me Pluto should be reinstated to planet status, returning our Solar System to nine.


6 posted on 09/15/2014 1:01:39 PM PDT by Paulie (Get off the grid.)
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To: BenLurkin

I remember watching Voyager 2’s approach to Neptune on Nasa TV years ago, and as “exciting” as it was to watching the images refresh about ever 45 minutes, this one has got me far more excited.

Everything we see is going to be completely 100% unknown.


7 posted on 09/15/2014 1:07:12 PM PDT by VanDeKoik
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To: Paulie

Here here!


8 posted on 09/15/2014 1:08:39 PM PDT by BenLurkin (This is not a statement of fact. It is either opinion or satire; or both.)
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To: Paulie

Or is that Hear hear!


9 posted on 09/15/2014 1:09:00 PM PDT by BenLurkin (This is not a statement of fact. It is either opinion or satire; or both.)
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To: Paulie

I think some people freaked out at the idea of our tidy little system being filled with maybe 15 planets.

It was silly to yank it from Pluto because it’s too small seeing that we have systems with worlds 4 times Jupiter’s size, orbiting half the distance of the Sun to Mercury in 10 hours.

Planets come in so many styles, it is dumb to limit it just yet.


10 posted on 09/15/2014 1:10:43 PM PDT by VanDeKoik
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To: cripplecreek
I've also been following New Horizons since it launched, and have regularly checked its mission page on the NASA website to see how far it's traveled and how far it has left to go.

I think this mission was originally named the “Kuiper Belt Express”, wasn't it?

11 posted on 09/15/2014 1:19:09 PM PDT by Pox (Good Night. I expect more respect tomorrow.)
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To: Pox

It was a previously scheduled mission.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto_Kuiper_Express


12 posted on 09/15/2014 1:21:57 PM PDT by cripplecreek ("Moderates" are lying manipulative bottom feeding scum.)
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To: VanDeKoik
Everything we see is going to be completely 100% unknown.

Sort of like this administration's plans for everything./sarc

13 posted on 09/15/2014 1:22:27 PM PDT by Don Corleone ("Oil the gun..eat the cannoli. Take it to the Mattress.")
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To: Let_It_Be_So

“I once had a relationship with an alien from the outer Solar System, but it was strictly Plutonic ...”

(nor Sirius)


14 posted on 09/15/2014 1:30:44 PM PDT by mikrofon (Space BUMP)
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To: BenLurkin

I’m really looking forward to this. I’m glad it was launched before Pluto was stripped of it’s status.


15 posted on 09/15/2014 1:32:24 PM PDT by colorado tanker
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To: Paulie; BenLurkin
How can Pluto be less than a planet if it has a moon(s)? Seems to me Pluto should be reinstated to planet status, returning our Solar System to nine.

The trouble with that is quite a lot of the asteroids have moons as well - at least sixty or seventy of them last time I looked. It's not that uncommon - some of the sizeable asteroids have moons larger than the moons of Mars.

16 posted on 09/15/2014 1:35:00 PM PDT by naturalman1975 ("America was under attack. Australia was immediately there to help." - John Winston Howard)
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To: mikrofon

Up Uranus.


17 posted on 09/15/2014 1:36:53 PM PDT by Safetgiver ( Islam makes barbarism look genteel.)
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To: naturalman1975

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzxXbr5gloI


18 posted on 09/15/2014 1:40:17 PM PDT by BenLurkin (This is not a statement of fact. It is either opinion or satire; or both.)
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To: VanDeKoik
It was silly to yank it from Pluto because it’s too small seeing that we have systems with worlds 4 times Jupiter’s size, orbiting half the distance of the Sun to Mercury in 10 hours.

Pluto was never a planet. Pluto is an asteroid. It was called a planet because it appeared close to where Lowell was looking for Planet X, the previously unknown planet that likely exists but hasn't yet been discovered.

Having a couple of small asteroids orbiting each other doesn't make them moons, nor does it qualify the largest one of them to be a planets.

Interestingly, Pluto's orbit around the sun is an ellipse which brings it closer to the Sun than Neptune at perihelion, and twice as far from the Sun as Neptune at aphelion.

And, speaking of tidy, there is somewhat of a correlation of distance from one planet to the next. Take the orbit of the planet, multiply by 1.6 and you will get very close to the orbit of the next planet. For instance, Earth, 93 million miles, times 1.6 equals about 147 million, which is fairly close to Mars' orbit of 141 million miles. The pattern holds out all the way to Neptune, with the asteroid belt at 1.6 times 141, or 225 million miles. It is not exact, and the actual results may vary, but it is still interesting to note the interval. Pluto does not follow that pattern.

19 posted on 09/15/2014 1:44:57 PM PDT by webheart (We are all pretty much living in a fiction.)
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To: VanDeKoik
I think some people freaked out at the idea of our tidy little system being filled with maybe 15 planets.

If it was only fifteen or so, the decision might have been different but there are probably at least a hundred objects around the size of Pluto in the Kuiper belt and possibly considerably more - we've only found a few of them so far because they are hard to find from Earth, but there a lot of them. The odds of there being more than one or two "planet sized objects" anywhere remotely close to the sun however are very low as the effects of their gravity would be detectable - there is a reasonable possibility of one more Mars size planet at about twice the distance of Neptune, or a gas giant much much further away as that could explain some irregularities in a couple of the dwarf planet orbits - but there really can't be much more than that on current understandings of orbits.

Pluto, sizewise, is simply of a category that is much more common than the planets. Include Pluto, and you're going to have to include hundreds of others eventually as we find them.

The only grounds for keeping Pluto really would be to grandfather it in as a special case - which I wouldn't mind at all, and some astronomers do support that idea - but it would be special treatment for historical/nostalgic reasons.

20 posted on 09/15/2014 1:48:08 PM PDT by naturalman1975 ("America was under attack. Australia was immediately there to help." - John Winston Howard)
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