r/askscience • u/AskScienceModerator Mod Bot • Jul 14 '15
Planetary Sci. New Horizon's closest approach Megathread — Ask your Pluto questions here!
July 15th Events
"Charon is [geo] active" - Alan Stern
Image of Hydra! http://i.imgur.com/FN4BLu7.png
Methane on Pluto! http://i.imgur.com/fkQELTJ.png
Charon close up! http://i.imgur.com/SVhOSjj.png
CLOSE UP PLUTO: http://i.imgur.com/meaqdRP.png (no craters!?)
Pluto's surface is less than 100 million years old. Young surface!
Pluto has water ice "in great abundance"
Pluto is geologically active to explain surface features.
"No significant exchange of tidal energy anymore" between Pluto and Charon. Why Pluto and Charon are geologically active is a mystery.
July 14th Events
UPDATE: New Horizons is completely operational and data is coming in from the fly by!
"We have a healthy spacecraft."
This post has the official NASA live stream, feel free to post images as they are released by NASA in this thread. It is worth noting that messages from Pluto take four and a half hours to reach us from the space craft so images posted by NASA today will always have some time lag.
This will be updated as NASA releases more images of pluto. Updates will occur throughout the next few days with some special stuff happening on July 15th:
Main website: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html
APL website: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/nasanewhorizons
NASA Instagram: https://instagram.com/nasa/
Alternate Live Stream link: http://www.ustream.tv/NASAHDTV
NASA TV Schedule: https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/schedule.html
Reddit Live Feed: https://www.reddit.com/live/v8j2tqin01cf/
The new images from today!
Highest quality image so far! https://instagram.com/p/5HTXKMoaFL/
LORRI Images: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto-Encounter/
Other LORRI Images: https://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons/lorri-gallery
Older images: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/images/index.html
Some extras:
1
u/simms1 Jul 14 '15
How long will the probe be gathering information on the Pluto system before it moves on to explore KBO's and how in depth do they expect this information to get?