Posted on 05/28/2015 5:30:38 PM PDT by BenLurkin
NASA’s Dawn spacecraft is beginning to get up-close and personal with dwarf planet Ceres, as this latest image shows.
In this photo, which was snapped by the orbiting spacecraft at an altitude of 3,200 miles (5,100 kilometers) on May 23, imaged the landscape at a resolution of 480 meters per pixel, revealing craters and craters of craters — the divots blasted out of the surface by the resulting impact debris. Of particular note are the apparent horizontal lines of craters or gullies that appear throughout the field of view.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.discovery.com ...
The whole presentation is a straw man. He decides what he wants to shoot down, and then distorts what he wants to shoot down so it is easy to do.
Bet you didn't know it was also perfect for coating heavenly bodies.
Who are you going to believe, an astrophysicist (Brian K Oberlein), or a fanatic who can dismiss anything Oberlein says with no accountability?
Yeah, they do look kind of like “bubbles” rather than depressions in that photo. I think part of it is they seem to be shallower craters than we often see too, either they are older and more weathered, or maybe it is just a trick of the resolution.
When you get to fractional pixels per meter, it’s more convenient to use meters per pixel :)
The fact that you think the militant atheist agenda driven “rationalwiki” is a trustworthy source is pretty funny!
Here’s they entry on American conservatives, just for illustration:
“American conservatives are far to the right of conservatives in other Western nations. They have little compassion for poor people, overvalue the free market and are deeply suspicious of anything that seems to them government interference. Republicans in Congress, all for example oppose the Affordable Care Act, which is seen as dangerously socialist,[2] even though it had rather conservative origins.
Broadly and recently speaking, the conservative movement was split along two paths in the 1960s, defined by Barry Goldwater’s and Nelson Rockefeller’s approaches. Rockefeller’s was a more traditional conservatism, calling for fiscal responsibility and minimal government intrusion into private affairs, both personal and commercial (except for the Rockefeller drug laws, of course). Goldwater conservatism, which found its successful avatar in Ronald Reagan, was more reactionary, longing nostalgically for a time that never existed before modern changes that bother some people. The conservatism of Goldwater and Reagan was at the time called the New Right.
The center of the modern American conservative movement has incessantly been pushed further and further to the “right”: with each success, the bar is moved farther to the right; with each failure, it is likewise moved. It now has a tendemcy to incorporate strong elements of fundamentalist Christianity,[3] creationism including YEC, homophobia & xenophobia,[4] warmongering,[5] wilful ignorance towards science, global warming denial, people who think birth control is not a critical medical issue for women, and a prideful nationalism, typically manifested as a loudly enunciated belief that “America is the greatest country in the world”[6] and God’s chosen country. Many conservatives in the United States promote religious indoctrination in schools, such as prayer in public schools, which blatantly violates the separation of church and state. They generally support less government funding for scientific research that would benefit American ingenuity, but would rather want to reduce taxes on the already privileged and create tax havens for the rich. They also advocate for increased military and police spending to moralize the world, whatever that may mean.
The Bible nowhere mentions America but prideful biblical literalists in no way let that get in the way of their certainty that their America should lead the rest of the world to their way of thinking. Only citizens (mainly men) who accept the insane sound concepts of the Religious Right are true Americans and have the right to lead the world. Filthy Democrats are in no way properly American and can only lead the rest of the world to error. All this leaves residents of other nations, large and small, understandably cheesed off, indeed more sensible people in other countries may get anxious.
While not all conservatives, obviously, embrace all these views, walking away from more than a few can easily leave a politician “outside” the “big tent.” American conservatism has moved so far in some directions[7] (invasion of personal privacy[8] and big government[9] for instance), that many traditional conservatives have been stranded in its wake, wondering what happened to the tenets of the movement they used to hold dear and why they are now branded as deceitful, nasty libtards.”
“how does a star with an 8000K lower atmosphere heat an upper atmosphere to 1.5million K by convection...”
Yep, that’s the billion dollar question for the gravity-fusion theorists.
In their model, it’s absolutely necessary that the greatest amount of energy is being released from the core of the star, because that is the only place the gravitational forces are strong enough to force the atoms into fusion reactions. Yet, somehow the core is cool and all the energy suddenly appears in the upper levels of the heliosphere?
Even if all the energy from the core was being transmitted instantly, with 100% efficiency to the upper levels, the inverse-square law is going to come into play, so the temperature would still have to drop because the energy would be dispersing to an ever larger area the further it went from the core. So they aren’t just lacking a mechanism to explain how the energy is transmitted, but they would actually need to explain how the total energy INCREASES after it leaves the only part of the star where fusion could be occurring.
Well, I think it’s a matter of what we’re used to seeing. Normally protrusions on vertical surfaces like walls will have a highlight on their upper surface (and shadow on their lower side) because they’re typically lit from above whether by the sun or by artificial lighting. So when our mind sees craters with highlights on top it makes the natural assumption based on experience that they actually protrude. When you rotate the image so the highlight isn’t on top, that experiential logic is broken and you’re more likely to see the crater as the depression that it actually is.
So unless there is another higher-resolution camera (or a higher resolution mode) aboard this craft, we really cannot expect to see much fine detail as Ceres is approached. At 480m/pixel, the smallest object we could see is 480 meters in size? Or is my understanding of this faulty?
No, because the camera will be closer the parallax will allow each pixel to encompass fewer pixels. If the camera were sitting on Ceres, then you'd see millimeters per pixel, because the camera would be that close. . . if it could macro focus (unlikely). My Aunt worked for NSA before her retirement in the 1980s and they had military satellites then that could, she said, read the license plate numbers in the Kremlin's parking lot from 117 mile orbits. . . If atmospheric conditions were just right, which was very rare. Those cameras then were analogue and had far less resolution than do these cameras on Dawn. When Dawn gets close enough, we will see a lot more detail. We just have to wait.
Thank you.
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