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The Icy Mountains of Pluto
- mholt 11y agoDirect link to image gallery: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/images/index.html http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/images/index.h...
- sneak 11y agoConsidering the context (the significance of this event to the entirety of humanity), is this sort of nationalism gross to anyone other than me? http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/images/index.html?id=366579 http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/images/index.h...
- hackuser 11y agoYes; we could be a little more inclusive and magnanimous; it's an achievement for humanity (or does the U.S. get Pluto now?). I tend to suspect everything we see from NASA is choreographed; this might sell funding to part of NASA's tax base.
- happyscrappy 11y agoEurope is larger than the US and should be able to compete but can't for some reason.
- ghaff 11y agoMeh. You're cherry-picking one photo from that slideshow.
- ommunist 11y agoWhat is even more interesting, the artist Don Dixon more or less accurately predicted how Pluto looks like in 1979.
- 100k 11y agoVery interesting! Direct link: http://www.cosmographica.com/spaceart/pluto-predicted.html http://www.cosmographica.com/spaceart/pluto-predicted.html
- chasing 11y agoWell, his painting shares some superficial features that look similar to that one photo. Like a similar overall shading from light to dark. Other photos of Pluto look nothing like Dixon's painting. The "Pluto with a Heart" pic, for example. Dixon's painting is cool, but let's not make it something it's not.
- T-hawk 11y agoLet's also remember the fallacy of multiple endpoints. Many artists have rendered visual guesses at what Pluto might look like. And many will be totally wrong. We're cherry-picking the best example in Dixon, not a typical one.
- firebones 11y agoGreat point (love the fallacy of multiple endpoints). But there also may be some "algorithmic" smarts here in terms of Dixon's interpolation/extrapolation of what cold planetary bodies look like, even with what was known in 1979. Think of an image-generator bot that took some parameters of what was known (distance from Sun, whether it was a gas planet, atmospheric conditions, position relative to the asteroid belt, how size affects features) and kicked out plausible planets. This might be close to what you'd come up with if you made the mistake of forecasting more meteoric impact than actually occurred.
- vilmosi 11y agoThe Pluto photo he's using doesn't look like Pluto from NASA's website...
- dang 11y agoUrl changed from http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33543383 http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33543383, which is a fine article that adds some info, but perhaps not enough to override the preference for original sources.
- DIVx0 11y agoI did not really know what to expect but these photos are amazing and they're not even from the nearest approach! Who knew the surface would be so crater free?
- vruiz 11y ago> Unlike the icy moons of giant planets, Pluto cannot be heated by gravitational interactions with a much larger planetary body. Some other process must be generating the mountainous landscape. This is really exciting! There goes a theory. Charon seems to be also active, perhaps this suggests they split not so long ago? If that were the case it would be really interesting to know what hit them.
- discardorama 11y agoI don't use "mind blown" too often, but I will in this case. Here I am, sitting on my ass munching on a snack, admiring the mountains of a planet 3 Billion miles away. This is so amazing.
- ryanmcbride 11y ago*dwarf planet
- rogerbinns 11y agoAnd to think you are using a measurement system that is so archaic and suboptimal that the vast majority of the planet uses something better :-) Pluto is 4.7 billion kilometres distant at the moment.
- chasing 11y agoThat's amazing. The photo of Charon might be the most straight-up gorgeous of the lot so far: https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/charon-s-surprising-youthful-and-varied-terrain https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/charon-s-surprising-youth... At least to my eye. It's just such a classic shot of a world. Anyway: USA! USA! (I kid!) Go humanity!
- jgrahamc 11y agoUSA! USA! I've seem comments on here that it's not OK to say that, but if you are a US citizen then I think you damn well should be proud of this and I'll applaud anyone who makes space work. It's frikkin' hard. When I see a Soyuz launch I think "Go, Russia" and I felt similar things when India, China or Japan launch rockets. Just today Ariane put a satellite in space. Go, Europe! Hell, as a Brit I'm proud of Prospero: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospero_(satellite) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospero_(satellite)
- jsmthrowaway 11y ago> I've seem comments on here that it's not OK to say that, Oh man. My kingdom for this thread not starting again.
- noonespecial 11y agoAbsolutely. We're proud of our football teams, why not be proud of our space teams? I only wish we could stir the general public to equal levels of excitement for space as we can for sport.
- stefantalpalaru 11y ago> We're proud of our football teams, why not be proud of our space teams? Because at some point we realized that we can only be proud of our own achievements.
- sdoering 11y agoSadly most people never realize that and so they root for nations, sport teams and so on as a supplement. Mostly to identify with and also (in this process) to put others down. We (or most of us) need an identity and most of us never develop one for ourselves, that does not need an outside entity to feel strong/good/important/validated enough.
- jessaustin 11y agoNext century's hottest snowboarding destination...
- ryanmcbride 11y agoThe jumps would be pretty radical for sure.
- egwor 11y agodon't forget your torch!
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- KeytarHero 11y agoAt 44K (-380 F), I'd say it's more like next century's coldest snowboarding destination
- LastZactionHero 11y agoBut at least the lifts won't be windy.
- natep 11y agoExcept there is an atmosphere...
- yuchi 11y agoI’m very sorry to inform you that at those temperatures you’d be frozen to death. But even once you came out with some cool (hot?) solution for this nicety, you still couldn’t ski/snowboard. That’s because the snow on earth is relatively close to 0°C, and therefore in that particular stage where ice is lighter (it has more volume) than liquid water. If you apply pressure to it it’s easier for the ice to go back to the liquid state and therefore giving you the ability to ski. At those temperatures it would be as snowboarding on sand. Which is a very loved sport, but not that easy.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- ohitsdom 11y agoAmazing. Crater-less mountains, and we have no idea how they were formed (or are forming!). Lots of exciting science ahead!
- elorant 11y agoWhy are most of the pics black and white?
- hga 11y agoThe highest resolution imaging system, LORRI, is monochrome. They can provide color by using another, lower resolution system named Ralph, or by any of a number of false color approaches. See more e.g. here: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Mission/Spacecraft/Payload.php http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Mission/Spacecraft/Payload.php
- mbq 11y agoHonestly speaking, "colour" cameras we use every day are also false colour; they shoot 3 monochrome images in red, blue and green chunks of spectrum and mix the whole thing using plethora of parameters like white balance, or gamma. All this is heavily tuned towards human vision specifics to enable either monitor or print to induce a similar sensation in the viewer's brain that the photographed object would, despite the fact that the whole process retains only a negligible fraction of the information carried into the camera by the original photons. Quite a lot of animals perceive the hue of human-made photos and videos as totally odd, misexposed or desaturated, just because of having vision adapted to wavelengths or other properties of light which our processing mostly removes as redundant. Even more, one day humans may start to enrich their vision by technological or biological modifications, consequently beginning to perceive today photos as as dull as we see those old, monochrome ones.
- rodgerd 11y agoThe Foveon sensors are a sort-of exception to this rule, but they haven't really demonstrated enough visible benefits for them to become widely adopted.
- Sharlin 11y agoTo elaborate a bit, almost all digital cameras take a single monochrome exposure but each sensor element has either a red, green, or blue filter over it, in a mosaic pattern. From the relative brightnesses of neighboring pixels color data can be reconstructed and interpolated to form a human-viewable image.
- napoleoncomplex 11y agoThe most exciting part is the following: "The close-up image was taken about 1.5 hours before New Horizons closest approach to Pluto, when the craft was 47,800 miles (77,000 kilometers) from the surface of the planet. The image easily resolves structures smaller than a mile across." At its closest, the probe was 7,800 miles away, so we're going to get images way clearer than this in the following days, and even this is amazing to look at.
- draugadrotten 11y agoIt will take approx 16 months to transfer all the pictures it took, because it is transmitting at only 1 kbit/second. http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/01300800-talking-to-pluto-is-hard.html?referrer=https://www.google.se/ http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/0130080...
- brock_r 11y agoYour linked article says 2 weeks, not 16 months. 11 photos a day.
- rootbear 11y agoI don't know why that article quotes two weeks. I've read the 16 months figure in several places and it was mentioned in the press briefings yesterday. There might be a specific subset of data that will take two weeks to get. Perhaps the low-res JPGs of all of the planet imagery.
- dEnigma 11y agoThat article says two weeks because it's talking about a different set of images, from January. The uncompressed images from the fly-by will take the roughly 16 months you mentioned, but there will be smaller, compressed images before that.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- etrautmann 11y agoThe estimate that this area is very new based on the fact that there are no meteor craters assumes that we know the distribution of meteors and space debris in the outer solar system. Does anyone know if we do in fact know this? It seems plausible that there would be far fewer things at that distance, so the frequency of collisions would be lower.
- ojbyrne 11y agoI believe that NASA expected lots of craters on Pluto due to its close proximity to the Kuiper Belt, which is full of asteroids and other small objects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt
- 3JPLW 11y agoFull is quite relative. The Kuiper belt encompasses a ridiculously large volume of space.
- drewolbrich 11y agoSimilarly, the asteroid belt is "full of asteroids" that are mostly only a few meters across, with an average distance between each asteroid of a few million kilometers.
- zzzeek 11y agohow does Pluto's inclined orbit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plutoorbit1.5sideview.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plutoorbit1.5sideview.gif) affect its exposure to other Kuiper Belt objects? Is it still well within the cloud of objects at its greatest points of divergence from the ecliptic?
- CountSessine 11y agoIt also seems plausible that there would be more collisions that far out - Pluto is believed to be a Kuiper Belt object, after all.
- dfar1 11y agoI am always amazed at how far we've come. I wish I could live 100 years more.
- rootbear 11y agoI completely agree. I keep saying that nothing interesting happens in less than 10,000 years. Or a million. Compared to the Universe, human lifetimes are instantaneous. Such a pity.
- ape4 11y agoNobody has seen those mountains before!
- andrewstuart2 11y agoAlso a cool shot of Hydra, for the first time showing its shape. https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/hydra-emerges-from-the-shadows https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/hydra-emerges-from-the-sh...
- zw123456 11y agoI have seen a number of articles about the lack of craters and the assumption that this means recent geological activity. But that would assume a similar craterization rate to that of the inner planets like Mars and our Moon. I am wondering, is it possible that due to it's orbit, distance and smaller size that the rate is just a lot slower? whatever, It is just a mind boggling accomplishment, and the photos really are incredible.
- cossatot 11y agoInterestingly, they don't look like mountains formed by collisional or extensional tectonic processes to my eye (a geologist who studies mountain formation). They look sort of like diapirs (i.e. lower density material pushing up through a higher-density medium; frozen methane and nitrogen are both less dense than water ice[1]) or vaguely like eroded volcanoes, but without obvious vents. Very different erosional processes could explain some of it, but it certainly doesn't look like typical plate-tectonic or ice-sheet topography. Super cool! [1]: https://extras.springer.com/2006/978-1-4020-4351-2/Jenam/Session4/4Csatorre.pdf https://extras.springer.com/2006/978-1-4020-4351-2/Jenam/Ses...
- Maultasche 11y agoSo Pluto wears diapirs. Ha Ha. Actually, that's really interesting. I had no idea there was such a thing as a diapir. Your comment on eroded volcanoes made me wonder if water on Pluto acts a lot like rock on Earth and if there are water volcanoes that result from sub-surface heat transforming water into liquid.
- jheriko 11y agoif you are interested read some stuff on the subject, there is loads of it around... ice is a sort of equivalent to rock beyond a certain (not as far as pluto by a long way) distance from the sun. astronomers have a funny idea about what the word ice means too...
- S4M 11y agoProbably a naive question, but why is it the case? we have the basic formula of thermodynamic: PV = nRT, with n and R being constant, so if I keep the volume the constant and decrease the temperature, it would decrease the pressure P, making the material less hard. What am I missing?
- pm90 11y agoPV = nRT is for ideal _gases_, ice is solid.
- r721 11y agoEmily Lakdawalla's commentary: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/07151720-first-look-at-new-horizons-pluto-charon.html http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/0715172...
- erobbins 11y agoIt's very surprising to me how much (apparent) recent geologic activity there is on both pluto and charon. I had expected them to be much more mercury like. Pluto was my favorite planet growing up. I never dreamed I'd get to see it up close.
- mrfusion 11y agoHow do they measure altitude of the mountains without a sea level?
- cgriswald 11y agoIt's based on the mean surface level rather than the mean sea level.
- lifeisstillgood 11y agohttps://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/pluto-observations-through-the-years.gif https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/pl... This is a time-lapse series of images of Pluto over the years - from a couple of pixels to today's mountain ranges. In about three seconds you get a full, visual, easy to read justification and explanation for the whole space budget and science funding - it is awesome. This is what we want to see - go NASA
- angst_ridden 11y agoI can't help it. I tear up and I get all emotional every time I see NASA pictures of a new planetary surface. To think a bunch of apes can look at and appreciate mountains 6 billion kilometers away... it's awe inspiring!
- jmadsen 11y agoI can understand why people like my wife look at these pictures and say, "Meh. That's nice." The enormity of the distances and what humanity has done is, quite honestly, beyond what our minds are actually capable of fully comprehending. I'll re-post this for your weekend enjoyment: http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.h...
- yati 11y agoThis made me wonder, how do they measure the heights of the mountains? Using data from multiple view angles?
- Schiphol 11y agoHaving to come up with scientific lessons on the spot ("this may cause us to rethink..."), for the sake of press releases must be pretty stressful. I'm also not sure that such more-or-less impromptu analyses foster the right conception of how science works.
- hga 11y agoWell, per Emily Lakdawalla's blog quoting scientist Amy Barr (http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/07151720-first-look-at-new-horizons-pluto-charon.html http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/0715172...): Every time we have looked at a body that has experienced tidal heating, such as Io, Europa, Enceladus, we find that the body has been more active, or is putting out 10 to 100 times the amount of heat predicted by models. Enceladus taught us that our models of tidal heating for icy bodies were not right, and I think the Pluto/Charon system could be telling us something similar. And it's not like these people weren't already reviewing the current state of the art in anticipation of how these Pluto images might add to it.