Eeet's Verrry Cold...
Eeeennn Spaaaaace!
Posted on 07/13/2015 5:45:36 PM PDT by radu
LAUREL, Md. — With less than a day to go before NASA's New Horizons mission zooms past Pluto, scientists reported on Monday that the dwarf planet isn't quite as dwarfish as they thought — in fact, it's the largest known solar system object beyond Neptune.
How large? Based on New Horizons imagery, its diameter is 2,370 kilometers (1,473 miles), plus or minus 20 kilometers (12.4 miles). That makes it almost 30 miles wider than Eris, the dwarf planet whose discovery led to Pluto's downfall as the "ninth planet" back in 2006. Eris' diameter has been measured to be 2,326 kilometers (1,445 miles), plus or minus 12 kilometers (7.5 miles).
*snip*
Stern said New Horizons' observations also confirmed that Pluto has a polar ice cap, and that the composition of that cap is different and more methane-rich than the dark bands and splotches of material ringing Pluto's equator. The piano-sized probe's instruments also have detected atoms of nitrogen escaping from the dwarf planet's atmosphere, Stern said.
*snip*
Because Pluto is almost 3 billion miles away, it will take 4.5 hours of travel time at the speed of light for the all-clear signal to reach Earth. If and when that moment comes, sometime around 9 p.m. ET Tuesday, it will set off a cheering, jumping-for-joy celebration at APL's Mission Operations Center.
"Tomorrow evening's going to be a little bit of drama," Stern said Monday.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
I didn't say that. It was part of a quote from the article I linked to.
Yeah, I had visions of all the stuff in 2001 coming true! Lots a luck for that one. We all had stars in our eyes in those days. Now here I sit at 67, with a lousy cold keeping me up drinking hot spiked Coffee in my “Screw Astonomers Pluto is a Planet” inscripted mug! How appropriate!
Oh and I’m going to ware my free Pluto t shirt tomorrow as well!
My dad was an aeronautical engineer and some of his work was involved with the space program. It was he who got me interested in space and the planets at a young age. It all started with standing in the yard one night watching brand-new Sputnik zoom overhead.
I read science fiction books and went to movies and just KNEW we were really going to do many of those things in my lifetime.
Then it all went ka-put. There are those who would like to build their own space programs but I won’t live long enough to see any of them come to fruition.
Bummer about your cold but I’m sitting here envious of that mug! LOL!
Yes the guy who discovered it was VERY observant. IIRC, he noted changes in Neptune's orbit that didn't make sense, so he went looking at star charts.
And Bingo!
I once edited Wikipedia, for the distance from the Earth to the Moon, it had it in KMs and I put the miles next to it in parenthesis.
Some GD eurotrash reverted my edit and spouted some BS about how I should just covert it in my head.
Anyway, cool to have real pictures of Pluto.
I guess I’ll tell this story one more time I’ve been posting it on some Pluto related threads. We moved to El Paso from Germany while I was in the Military. I have always been interested in Sci Fi, like you we watched Sputnick and were carried away by the space program. My job before we moved back to Ft. Bliss was that of a missile unit evaluator for NATO AAFCE at times and all the time for US Units. A lot off our work was done at night. I got interested in star gazing, my wife gave me a Walkman Astronomy tape so I was able to figure out all those stars I had been seeing on all those nights.
When we got home to the US I looked to Join an Astronomy club but there
was not a one in El Paso at the time, 1990, so I joined the closest one which was in Las Cruses. So I went to meetings there and to Star Parties I found the type of scope that would fit my needs bought one and had a great time observing.
One of our Observing sites was Upham, NM about 40 miles north of Las Cruses, which is now the home of Spaceport America. Anyway, I found out that we had a unique member of the club Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto. He was a very interesting guy to say the least. Always friendly with an engaging smile. I got to sit next to him a couple of times and saw him sporting this huge Walt Disney Pluto watch. It was very big and I often wondered if it was specialy made for him. He gave several talks about his Astronomy career. One of them was presenting all his hand drawn maps of Mars done at the Lowell Observatory in AZ the same Scope he used to find Pluto.
If you had seen pictures of him in his youth, it was kind of a shock to see him as a severely hunchbacked small of stature person that he had become. But he still seemed happy. Later he got too frail to come anymore and passed in 97. As I sit here typing a little bit of his ashes will soon pass by Pluto. God speed Clyde!
That pompous Neil DeGrass Tyson led the movement to de-classify Pluto.
I'd love to see him choke on that.
Oh well.
+1
The moon is larger than Pluto, you are using the wrong numbers to compare.
Gonvert is fun to mess with thanks for the pointer. I have been making improbable conversions all night. i.e. speed of sound in cubits per hour, rods/sec.
You're quite welcome. I've been playing with various versions since way before it was even a GUI app. It all started as essentially a lookup table of units of measurement. I remember reading through it, looking at some of the more esoteric stuff. How many "magnums" does a barrel (US) contain? It has expanded a bit since.
Well I’m glad you decided to post your story one more time because I missed it when you posted on other Pluto threads.
VERY cool that you wound up joining the same astronomy club that Clyde was a member of and got to know him.
I’m lovin’ the fact some of his cremains are on New Horizons. His family members must have had goose bumps this morning, knowing he was zipping past Pluto.
I’ll be glued to the NASA channel this evening with all appendages crossed that the all-clear comes through from the spacecraft.
I'm old enough to remember looking at the moon as a child and being told by my Dad that no one had ever seen the far side. When the Soviets had a spaceship that sent back photos of the far side for the first time, my mother thought they had faked them.
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