Posted on 09/15/2014 12:40:50 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Here’s Hydra! The New Horizons team spotted the tiny moon of Pluto in July, about six months ahead of when they expected to. You can check it out in the images below. The find is exciting in itself, but it also bodes well for the spacecraft’s search for orbital debris to prepare for its close encounter with the system in July 2015.
Most of Pluto’s moons were discovered while New Horizons was under development, or already on its way. Mission planners are thus concerned that there could be moons out there that aren’t discovered yet — moons that could pose a danger to the spacecraft if it ended up in the wrong spot at the wrong time. That’s why the team is engaging in long-range views to see what else is lurking in Pluto’s vicinity.
“We’re thrilled to see it, because it shows that our satellite-search techniques work, and that our camera is operating superbly. But it’s also exciting just to see a third member of the Pluto system come into view, as proof that we’re almost there,” stated science team member John Spencer, of the Southwest Research Institute.
(Excerpt) Read more at universetoday.com ...
A plutoon!
yeah..many “herding” moons/objects, that can’t be seen.
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.
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.
Here here!
Or is that Hear hear!
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.
I think this mission was originally named the “Kuiper Belt Express”, wasn't it?
Sort of like this administration's plans for everything./sarc
“I once had a relationship with an alien from the outer Solar System, but it was strictly Plutonic ...”
(nor Sirius)
I’m really looking forward to this. I’m glad it was launched before Pluto was stripped of it’s status.
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.
Up Uranus.
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.
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.
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