Posted on 07/14/2015 4:52:26 AM PDT by kidd
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft aimed to get up-close and personal with Pluto on Tuesday, on track to zoom within 7,800 miles of the small icy world left unexplored until now.
It’s the final destination on NASA’s planetary tour of the solar system, which began more than a half-century ago. Pluto was still a full-fledged planet when New Horizons rocketed away in 2006, only to become demoted to dwarf status later that year.
The 3 billion-mile journey from Cape Canaveral, Florida, culminates Tuesday at 7:49 a.m. EDT. That’s when the spacecraft is due to fly past Pluto at 31,000 mph.
The New Horizons team gathered at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, won’t know for many hours if everything went well. The spacecraft will be too busy taking photographs and collecting information to “phone home.” A confirmation signal is expected at around 9 p.m. EDT.
New Horizons already has beamed back the best-ever images of Pluto and big moon Charon. Pluto also has four little moons.
(Excerpt) Read more at nydailynews.com ...
Planet Bttt
Amen
God’s universe is immense. I am in awe.
Amen
And at the same time infinitely tiny.
I am somewhere in the middle.
Angry little money aren’t you
“So you’ve witnessed pluto orbiting the sun?”
“an orbit of the sun is a requirement for a planet (among several other well documented criteria), and pluto’s orbit (that we’ve never fully observed) is 248 years, and pluto was discovered in 1930.”
True, Pluto has not made a complete circuit since it was discovered. However, don’t you suppose those guys are smart enough to observe the arc that planet has made since 1930 and correctly conclude that it is an orbit around the sun? Their ability to put that probe at the right place at the right time validates their calculations for Pluto’s orbit.
Does it really matter what I personally think? I am over 50, pluto has always been a planet to me.
I’ve just been stating what the requirements for being included as a planet, and one of them is an observed orbit around the sun.
Of course it can be calculated and clearly that has been done.
Someone on another thread had a link to a website that represented the 'scale' of the distance between the Sun and all the planets.
If you try to represent accurate distances on a piece of paper , the scale of the planets is so small that they are invisible.
Considering we have no information to the contrary, the Universe is infinite. We can no more 'understand' infinite than we can grasp the 'distance' between our solar system and the nearest star. The scale is so large , it is beyond our 'experience'.
BTW, there are new pictures of Pluto from the close fly by, on the web.
Ice Mountains.
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