9 ms·

New Horizons: Pluto displays rippling terrain

138 points by antouank 11y ago

LesZedCB 11y ago
I didn't see this link the first time, but here's a 30MB photo of the whole surface. It's absolutely incredible! http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/crop_p_color2_enhanced_release.png http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/cro...
- randlet 11y ago
  Phenomenal shot thanks!
- encoderer 11y ago
  The really big craters with the mountain in the center -- is that the remains of the projectile?
- montecarl 11y ago
  I made it into a 1920x1080 wallpaper. I love high res photos of the planets for wall papers. http://imgur.com/6EU8Tc4 http://imgur.com/6EU8Tc4
542458 11y ago
Does anybody know what caused the large beige "smooth" surface feature slightly to the right of centre in the article's large photo of the planet? I think it forms part of the "heart" that was all over social media. http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/6490/production/_85744752_85744751.jpg http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/6490/production/_...
- dvh 11y ago
  It must have melted "recently"
- drabiega 11y ago
  That's Sputnik Planum. Supposedly it's a water/methane glacier? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_Planum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_Planum
nkozyra 11y ago
I feel like we're all saying "amazing" or "incredible" but it warrants taking a few seconds and drawing a mental picture of just how - pardon the term - astronomical the task of getting New Horizons to Pluto is. 115 years ago we didn't really even have airplanes. Now we're taking color photographs of something nearly 5 billion miles away from Earth. It's insane. I can't help but daydream about the insanity of 2130.
- fit2rule 11y ago
  Facts like this always make me wonder if perhaps we, as a species, haven't undergone some major mutation in the last 100 years or so as a result of .. I dunno, some cosmic event or something .. to accelerate our intelligence and understanding of the universe, and propel us so rapidly into the current state of things. Sometimes, it sure feels like the human species took a major, major leap somewhere .. and I wonder what it is? Sure, it can be explained culturally - the Enlightenment, world wars, medicine, etc. But how come things are being compelled along at an exponential rate so rapidly .. penicillin? Electricity? All of the above? Just: whoa. The next 100 years is probably going to be amazing ..
  - dbh937 11y ago
    One way you can think about it is that humanity's finally hit the "elbow" in the exponential curve of technological advancement.
    - Retra 11y ago
      That doesn't work... every point in an exponential curve is the "elbow." That's its defining characteristic, actually.
      - nkozyra 11y ago
        While technically true, if you stop at any point and zoom out far enough you will get something reminiscent of a hockey stick moment.
interdrift 11y ago
Where is New Horizons headed now?What is the destination goal as "deeper into the solar system" doesn't say precisely where? It says it is 90mil km from Pluto.
- r721 11y ago
  "The New Horizons mission has formally selected its next target after Pluto: a tiny, dim, frozen world currently named 2014 MU69. The spacecraft will perform a series of four rocket firings in October and November to angle its trajectory to pass close by 2014 MU69 in early January 2019. In so doing, New Horizons will become the first flyby craft to pass by a target that was not discovered before the spacecraft launched. However, NASA has not yet committed to keeping New Horizons operational long enough to perform science at 2014 MU69; that decision will be made next year, when numerous other solar system extended missions are all up for review." http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/09011608-new-horizons-extended-mission-pt1.html http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/0901160...
  - kchoudhu 11y ago
    "We really don't want to know more about a Kuiper belt object" -- No priorization committee ever. The 2014 MU69 flyby is happening.
    - r721 11y ago
      Yeah, it's thoroughly explained further in the article, I just didn't want to quote too much.
  - lentil_soup 11y ago
    What does it mean it has not committed to keeping it operational? Are the costs that high to send those signals to consider just ditching the entire project?
    - r721 11y ago
      It means there is no decision yet, but it's very likely that the extended mission will be approved: "When NASA committed to build New Horizons, it committed to operate the spacecraft and support its science team through its primary mission goal: the Pluto encounter. NASA’s budget projections reflect this (page PS-32 in their 2016 Request, for example). You can see NASA requesting about $20 million per year for New Horizons until 2018, at which point the requests promptly drop to $0. This isn’t as scary as it looks. It merely reflects that, on paper, the New Horizons mission is only approved through the Pluto encounter, the time it takes to downlink all of the data, and the time it would take to close out the mission. Continued funding is approved every two years based on scientific proposals submitted to NASA and evaluated by an independent review panel. These are called extended missions, and nearly every science mission gets one, owing to the fact that not scuttling a spacecraft actively returning great science to save 0.01% of your budget is a stupidly easy case to make (for the most part). So while the New Horizons team must make a scientifically sound argument for extended mission funding, it won’t be too hard to do. New Horizons was submitted to a NASA proposal for a “Pluto Kuiper Belt Mission.” The first planetary science Decadal Survey (which prioritizes the scientific goals in the solar system for the decade New Horizons was launched) recommended a mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. New Horizons itself is over-engineered for Pluto (just like Voyager was over-engineered for Jupiter and Saturn). The capability to reach and study a Kuiper belt object beyond Pluto is built in to this mission, and it would be a highly embarrassing and unlikely misstep for NASA to deny a mission extension, particularly a few months after its greatest public outreach moment since the landing of the Curiosity rover."
strictnein 11y ago
Pluto being that red never crossed my mind. Although I'm a little unclear on whether or not it even gets enough sun for the human eye to see that color. If it was daytime on Pluto, would one even be able to, say, read outside? I wonder if the light from the stars of our galaxy would provide more or less light than the sun? Edit: To answer my own question, Phil Plait wrote about this here: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/03/15/bafact-math-how-bright-is-the-sun-from-pluto/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/03/15/ba... > "[on Earth] the Sun is about 400,000 times brighter than the full Moon, so even from distant, frigid Pluto, on average the Sun would look more than 250 times brighter than the full Moon does from Earth"
- david-given 11y ago
  NASA have a tool here: http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/plutotime/ http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/plutotime/ Tell it where you live, and it'll tell you what time the light there matches an average day on Pluto, so you can go out and try it. It's surprisingly bright.
  - strictnein 11y ago
    Oh, wow. That's really neat. A little after 7pm for me. I'll be stepping outside with a book to see if I can read it.
  - arethuza 11y ago
    Quite surprised by that - it said 7:10pm for here in Edinburgh - which is just after sunset so still fairly bright.
    - arethuza 11y ago
      I checked at 7:10pm and perfectly easy to read a book - really not what I would have thought at all.
- jessriedel 11y ago
  Another HN commentator once gave me an excellent tip for getting an intuition for that sort of question: the ratio between a mile and an inch (63,360) is almost exactly the same as a lightyear and an astronomical unit (63,239). Pluto is at 40 AU, and the closest stars are at ~4 ly. So if you're sitting on Pluto and the sun is 40 inches (~ 1 m) away, the closest stars are about 4 miles (~6 km) away. As far out as Pluto is, it is nowhere close to the next star, and the Sun is still overwhelmingly the brightest thing in the sky.
rndn 11y ago
It's great seeing a big publisher like BBC linking to raw data and full resolution images. It seems they are beginning to understand the medium.
jessriedel 11y ago
Incredible. Is this the highest resolution photo, in terms of smallest resolved features, that we will receive covering all of Pluto? Or covering just a section?
- bhrgunatha 11y ago
  See LesZedCB's comment* for the 30MB image of the whole surface. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10277891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10277891
  - jessriedel 11y ago
    No, sorry, I was actually referring to that image. I should have replied to him. Is that image the highest resolution?
jonknee 11y ago
And it's depressing that we're cutting the budget of stuff like New Horizons while funneling ever more money into killing other humans.
- vixen99 11y ago
  It is depressing but sometimes we have to kill them - I mean the folk who enjoy burning people alive and creating sex slaves, not to mention horrendous refugee misery for everyone concerned - before they kill us.
  - user_0001 11y ago
    and your bombs don't burn innocents alive, men women and children? And don't say "oh the intent". The intent is there both sides, I believe the media sound bite is called "collateral damage", but the burning alive of innocents means the same and your country has no trafficked women and girls forced to work as prostitutes. and these people are most annoyed about what? Outside meddling in their countries. They are but pawns in geo-political manoeuvring that has been going for years. We all live in glass houses and none of us should throw stones
    - Retric 11y ago
      I think it's relevant just what the 'West' did to each other over the last 100 years. We killed more people in single bombing raids than entire 'modern' wars. Precision bombing used to mean little more than attacking the right city.
      - Phlarp 11y ago
        This fact does not excuse the current behavior of either side.
    - darkmighty 11y ago
      Not going to defend the US, but do you really know what the Taliban did in Afghanistan? It's definitively not a "glass house" situation. It's a civilian massacre, rape of woman of all ages, prohibition of education, promotion of religious extremism situation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban#Human_rights_abuses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban#Human_rights_abuses
hackuser 11y ago
Does anyone know if this is a true or 'false' color image?
- metafunctor 11y ago
  It says “enhanced colour view of Pluto” in the article.
- jffry 11y ago
  http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/the-rich-color-variations-of-pluto http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/the-rich-color-variations-... says it's a false-color image incorporating blue + red visible light along with infrared. Here's a true-color image: http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/global-mosaic-of-pluto-in-true-color http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/global-mosaic-of-pluto-in-...

138 points by antouank 11y ago

I didn't see this link the first time, but here's a 30MB photo of the whole surface. It's absolutely incredible! http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/crop_p_color2_enhanced_release.png http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/cro...

randlet 11y ago
Phenomenal shot thanks!
encoderer 11y ago
The really big craters with the mountain in the center -- is that the remains of the projectile?
montecarl 11y ago
I made it into a 1920x1080 wallpaper. I love high res photos of the planets for wall papers. http://imgur.com/6EU8Tc4 http://imgur.com/6EU8Tc4

542458 11y ago

Does anybody know what caused the large beige "smooth" surface feature slightly to the right of centre in the article's large photo of the planet? I think it forms part of the "heart" that was all over social media. http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/6490/production/_85744752_85744751.jpg http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/6490/production/_...

dvh 11y ago
It must have melted "recently"
drabiega 11y ago
That's Sputnik Planum. Supposedly it's a water/methane glacier? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_Planum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_Planum

nkozyra 11y ago

I feel like we're all saying "amazing" or "incredible" but it warrants taking a few seconds and drawing a mental picture of just how - pardon the term - astronomical the task of getting New Horizons to Pluto is. 115 years ago we didn't really even have airplanes. Now we're taking color photographs of something nearly 5 billion miles away from Earth. It's insane. I can't help but daydream about the insanity of 2130.

fit2rule 11y ago
Facts like this always make me wonder if perhaps we, as a species, haven't undergone some major mutation in the last 100 years or so as a result of .. I dunno, some cosmic event or something .. to accelerate our intelligence and understanding of the universe, and propel us so rapidly into the current state of things. Sometimes, it sure feels like the human species took a major, major leap somewhere .. and I wonder what it is? Sure, it can be explained culturally - the Enlightenment, world wars, medicine, etc. But how come things are being compelled along at an exponential rate so rapidly .. penicillin? Electricity? All of the above? Just: whoa. The next 100 years is probably going to be amazing ..
- dbh937 11y ago
  One way you can think about it is that humanity's finally hit the "elbow" in the exponential curve of technological advancement.
  - Retra 11y ago
    That doesn't work... every point in an exponential curve is the "elbow." That's its defining characteristic, actually.
    - nkozyra 11y ago
      While technically true, if you stop at any point and zoom out far enough you will get something reminiscent of a hockey stick moment.

interdrift 11y ago

Where is New Horizons headed now?What is the destination goal as "deeper into the solar system" doesn't say precisely where? It says it is 90mil km from Pluto.

r721 11y ago
"The New Horizons mission has formally selected its next target after Pluto: a tiny, dim, frozen world currently named 2014 MU69. The spacecraft will perform a series of four rocket firings in October and November to angle its trajectory to pass close by 2014 MU69 in early January 2019. In so doing, New Horizons will become the first flyby craft to pass by a target that was not discovered before the spacecraft launched. However, NASA has not yet committed to keeping New Horizons operational long enough to perform science at 2014 MU69; that decision will be made next year, when numerous other solar system extended missions are all up for review." http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/09011608-new-horizons-extended-mission-pt1.html http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/0901160...
- kchoudhu 11y ago
  "We really don't want to know more about a Kuiper belt object" -- No priorization committee ever. The 2014 MU69 flyby is happening.
  - r721 11y ago
    Yeah, it's thoroughly explained further in the article, I just didn't want to quote too much.
- lentil_soup 11y ago
  What does it mean it has not committed to keeping it operational? Are the costs that high to send those signals to consider just ditching the entire project?
  - r721 11y ago
    It means there is no decision yet, but it's very likely that the extended mission will be approved: "When NASA committed to build New Horizons, it committed to operate the spacecraft and support its science team through its primary mission goal: the Pluto encounter. NASA’s budget projections reflect this (page PS-32 in their 2016 Request, for example). You can see NASA requesting about $20 million per year for New Horizons until 2018, at which point the requests promptly drop to $0. This isn’t as scary as it looks. It merely reflects that, on paper, the New Horizons mission is only approved through the Pluto encounter, the time it takes to downlink all of the data, and the time it would take to close out the mission. Continued funding is approved every two years based on scientific proposals submitted to NASA and evaluated by an independent review panel. These are called extended missions, and nearly every science mission gets one, owing to the fact that not scuttling a spacecraft actively returning great science to save 0.01% of your budget is a stupidly easy case to make (for the most part). So while the New Horizons team must make a scientifically sound argument for extended mission funding, it won’t be too hard to do. New Horizons was submitted to a NASA proposal for a “Pluto Kuiper Belt Mission.” The first planetary science Decadal Survey (which prioritizes the scientific goals in the solar system for the decade New Horizons was launched) recommended a mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. New Horizons itself is over-engineered for Pluto (just like Voyager was over-engineered for Jupiter and Saturn). The capability to reach and study a Kuiper belt object beyond Pluto is built in to this mission, and it would be a highly embarrassing and unlikely misstep for NASA to deny a mission extension, particularly a few months after its greatest public outreach moment since the landing of the Curiosity rover."

strictnein 11y ago

Pluto being that red never crossed my mind. Although I'm a little unclear on whether or not it even gets enough sun for the human eye to see that color. If it was daytime on Pluto, would one even be able to, say, read outside? I wonder if the light from the stars of our galaxy would provide more or less light than the sun? Edit: To answer my own question, Phil Plait wrote about this here: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/03/15/bafact-math-how-bright-is-the-sun-from-pluto/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/03/15/ba... > "[on Earth] the Sun is about 400,000 times brighter than the full Moon, so even from distant, frigid Pluto, on average the Sun would look more than 250 times brighter than the full Moon does from Earth"

david-given 11y ago
NASA have a tool here: http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/plutotime/ http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/plutotime/ Tell it where you live, and it'll tell you what time the light there matches an average day on Pluto, so you can go out and try it. It's surprisingly bright.
- strictnein 11y ago
  Oh, wow. That's really neat. A little after 7pm for me. I'll be stepping outside with a book to see if I can read it.
- arethuza 11y ago
  Quite surprised by that - it said 7:10pm for here in Edinburgh - which is just after sunset so still fairly bright.
  - arethuza 11y ago
    I checked at 7:10pm and perfectly easy to read a book - really not what I would have thought at all.
jessriedel 11y ago
Another HN commentator once gave me an excellent tip for getting an intuition for that sort of question: the ratio between a mile and an inch (63,360) is almost exactly the same as a lightyear and an astronomical unit (63,239). Pluto is at 40 AU, and the closest stars are at ~4 ly. So if you're sitting on Pluto and the sun is 40 inches (~ 1 m) away, the closest stars are about 4 miles (~6 km) away. As far out as Pluto is, it is nowhere close to the next star, and the Sun is still overwhelmingly the brightest thing in the sky.

rndn 11y ago

It's great seeing a big publisher like BBC linking to raw data and full resolution images. It seems they are beginning to understand the medium.

jessriedel 11y ago

Incredible. Is this the highest resolution photo, in terms of smallest resolved features, that we will receive covering all of Pluto? Or covering just a section?

bhrgunatha 11y ago
See LesZedCB's comment* for the 30MB image of the whole surface. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10277891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10277891
- jessriedel 11y ago
  No, sorry, I was actually referring to that image. I should have replied to him. Is that image the highest resolution?

jonknee 11y ago

And it's depressing that we're cutting the budget of stuff like New Horizons while funneling ever more money into killing other humans.

vixen99 11y ago
It is depressing but sometimes we have to kill them - I mean the folk who enjoy burning people alive and creating sex slaves, not to mention horrendous refugee misery for everyone concerned - before they kill us.
- user_0001 11y ago
  and your bombs don't burn innocents alive, men women and children? And don't say "oh the intent". The intent is there both sides, I believe the media sound bite is called "collateral damage", but the burning alive of innocents means the same and your country has no trafficked women and girls forced to work as prostitutes. and these people are most annoyed about what? Outside meddling in their countries. They are but pawns in geo-political manoeuvring that has been going for years. We all live in glass houses and none of us should throw stones
  - Retric 11y ago
    I think it's relevant just what the 'West' did to each other over the last 100 years. We killed more people in single bombing raids than entire 'modern' wars. Precision bombing used to mean little more than attacking the right city.
    - Phlarp 11y ago
      This fact does not excuse the current behavior of either side.
  - darkmighty 11y ago
    Not going to defend the US, but do you really know what the Taliban did in Afghanistan? It's definitively not a "glass house" situation. It's a civilian massacre, rape of woman of all ages, prohibition of education, promotion of religious extremism situation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban#Human_rights_abuses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban#Human_rights_abuses

hackuser 11y ago

Does anyone know if this is a true or 'false' color image?

metafunctor 11y ago
It says “enhanced colour view of Pluto” in the article.
jffry 11y ago
http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/the-rich-color-variations-of-pluto http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/the-rich-color-variations-... says it's a false-color image incorporating blue + red visible light along with infrared. Here's a true-color image: http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/global-mosaic-of-pluto-in-true-color http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/global-mosaic-of-pluto-in-...