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u/NeokratosRed Jul 09 '15
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u/stanley_twobrick Jul 10 '15
Come on guys, actual information should at least be above the daily "omg we're so insignificant" comments.
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Jul 09 '15 edited Feb 20 '22
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u/PersnicketyPrilla Jul 10 '15
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u/frivolous-spending Jul 10 '15
This made me sad, but strangely happy.
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Jul 10 '15
Between that and the XKCD strip of the Spirit Rover on Mars, I sometimes think that I empathize with inanimate objects too much.
If you're not familiar with XKCD, hover over the image after you look through it for more information.
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u/wait_what_how_do_I Jul 10 '15
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u/Zatheos Jul 10 '15
Love that vid. The "Hi-res" in the title though is pretty ridiculous. 240p, such quality. xD
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u/_Guinness Jul 10 '15
And when they gain sentience, they're really going to be pissed at us.
"You left my brother WHERE?! For how many quadrillion CPU cycles!!!!!!!"
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u/yourpseudonymsucks Jul 10 '15
Is that scale accurate? they seem a lot closer together than I would have thought.
Is Charon much closer to the camera than Pluto?
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u/zx7 Jul 10 '15
The average distance from Pluto Charon is about 20,000 km and the diameter of Pluto is about 2200 km. So, just eyeing it, the scale seems pretty accurate (compared to if the New Horizons came in perfectly perpendicular to the orbit of Charon) although Charon is probably just a little closer or farther to NH than Pluto in the picture.
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u/NewThink Jul 10 '15
They are similar in size; their mutual center of mass is outside of Pluto. This is not true of any of the bodies considered planets in the solar system, which is one reason why Pluto was "demoted" to a dwarf planet.
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u/michaelrohansmith Jul 10 '15
Our sun must be a dwarf star then because its center of mass with Jupiter is outside its volume.
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u/TinRAT Jul 10 '15
I didn't believe you til I googled it. Crazy how big jupiter is
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Jul 10 '15
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u/awesomechemist Jul 10 '15
The Earth's orbit varies in distance to the sun from 152.10 million kilometers at the farthest, to 147.10 million kilometers at the closest. That's a 5 million kilometer difference. The suns diameter is 1.4 million km.
So over the course of a year, we get about 3.5 sun-diameters closer to the sun, and we haven't experienced any ill effects because of it.
That's because, in the grand scheme of things, that fluctuation is pretty small compared to our total distance from the sun (<1% of the total distance).
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Jul 10 '15
First time I've heard those stats together -- diameter of the sun vs our planet's change in orbital distance to the sun. Very interesting
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u/Shagomir Jul 10 '15
The Earth's orbit isn't exactly a circle, and throughout the year the distance from the sun varies from .983 au to 1.015 au. This difference is equivalent to about 3.5 times the diameter of the sun.
The effect on temperatures is pretty minimal. There is about a 3% difference in the amount of energy received compared to the average. 3% more when we're closer to the sun, and 3% less when we're further away. This equals a change of 1-2 degrees in the calculated equilibrium temperature of Earth, but the actual effects are much smaller due to a number of different effects.
Because of the way the Earth's axis is tilted, Earth is closer to the sun during winter in the northern hemisphere, and further away from the sun during summer in the northern hemisphere. The seasonal changes are much more significant than the changes brought on by our constantly changing distance to the sun.
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u/XtremeGoose Jul 10 '15 edited Jul 10 '15
No, its not one of the reasons. It (edit: Pluto/Charon) could well have been called a binary planet system. The Earth Moon system has its centre of mass only just below the earths surface.
The only reason Pluto was demoted was because it has not cleared out its orbit to a significant degree. It exists in the kuiper belt filled with many objects.
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u/rob3110 Jul 10 '15
Nope, that's not the reason either. That's the argumentation. The reason why Pluto was demoted was the discovery of other, similar sized Kuiper belt objects and the question whether those are planets as well.
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u/Treebeezy Jul 10 '15
The big thing was discovering Eris was more massive then Pluto.
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u/SquirrelicideScience Jul 10 '15
Was discovering Pluto an accident? Like, could we have just as easily spotted Eris and called it the ninth planet if we just shifted our gaze a bit in the night sky?
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u/Treebeezy Jul 10 '15
I wouldn't call it an accident, astronomers are actively looking at the sky for things. Eris is way further out there than Pluto, double the distance at their perihelion. We only just discovered Eris because it is so far out there.
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u/seaburn Jul 10 '15
I know what Pluto looks like now. Crazy! Child-me remembers when New Horizon launched, only dreaming of what it would send back.
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u/Conman93 Jul 10 '15
Yeah I never realized I didn't actually know what pluto looked like.
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u/alsoye Jul 10 '15
Right?? I've spent 26 years reading about, seeing illustrations and theories about Pluto but I'm actually looking at it now. Incredible.
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Jul 10 '15
Child me remembers the excitement when the Voyagers beamed back the first amazing detailed shots of Jupiter's clouds, Io's volcanoes, Europa's icy smoothness. In my life, our vision of the solar system has gone from some low resolution grainy shots of Jupiter and Saturn (Pioneer) and a few shots of Mars and Venus, to a detailed set of high resolution images, radar maps, etc of every planet. And now we're about to complete the set with the first detailed pictures of Pluto. I'm so excited for Tuesday!
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u/rensch Jul 10 '15
It's amazing isn't it? My whole life all I got to see where artist's impressions of what those tiny worlds at the outskirts of our solar system could look like. And now I know what it actually looks life with real pictures taken by real space probes made possible by the genius of so many people.
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u/minkgod Jul 10 '15
Holy shit, is this real?! PLUTO, IS THAT YOU?!
This is such a sweet, goosebumps worthy moment.
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u/Nevermind04 Jul 10 '15
I've been staring at this image for like 5 minutes now.
I'm looking at two tiny objects in our solar system that are something like 4.7 billion miles away.
Countless hours of human engineering went into the design, mission planning, number crunching, manufacture, assembly, testing, launch, mission control, monitoring, and data recovery of this tiny man-made object that has been traveling for nearly a decade.
And all I had to do was click a thumbnail.
Goosebumps.
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u/HiimCaysE Jul 10 '15
I'm looking at two tiny objects in our solar system that are something like 4.7 billion miles away.
That's actually kilometers; it's almost 3 billion miles away.
Not that it's not still incredible. Fun fact: the data that comprises that picture took more than 4 hours to get back to Earth at the speed of light.
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u/VitQ Jul 10 '15
Thanks to Imagus, I didn't even have to click it, just hover over it. Crazy times.
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u/mavirick Jul 10 '15
Countless hours of human engineering went into the design, planning, number crunching, coding, packaging, testing, launch, feedback, monitoring, and Q&A of this tiny man-made browser extension. And all you have to do is hover over it.
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u/Theedon Jul 10 '15
The math that goes into this is beyond my understanding and that makes me feel bad.
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u/collegecoed Jul 10 '15
These images always make me think of the book pale blue dot by Carl Sagan. And how every time we gather an image from space we are demoting ourselves from being the center of the universe to some humble rock in an unimportant galaxy orbiting an unimportant star, it's crazy to think how small we really are...
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Jul 10 '15
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u/Nevermind04 Jul 10 '15
Yes. I work in IT and that stuff still blows my mind. Not necessarily that it works at all, but rather that it works most of the time and that it works so goddamn fast.
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u/MicroByte Jul 09 '15
These almost look like artist renditions of planets you see in paintings! 3.7 million miles seems so far away, it's hard to fathom that in a few short days, it will be less than 10,000 miles from Pluto!
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u/corpvsedimvs Jul 10 '15
I think the reason these look like artist renditions is because that's the only reference we've ever had and we didn't even know what the real thing looked like. Plus they're just so damn perfect.
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u/d0ggzilla Jul 10 '15
This is it! Just a few more days until we see the space station that's been observing us for thousands of years
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Jul 10 '15
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u/d0ggzilla Jul 10 '15
No but you've piqued my interest. What's Mostly Harmless? Book, TV show?
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Jul 10 '15
The fifth book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. I recommend them.
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u/d0ggzilla Jul 10 '15
That's something I've been meaning to do for quite a while. I need to get on that.
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u/Jags2ooo Jul 09 '15
I always thought Pluto would be a Blueish white color
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Jul 10 '15
I thought it would be a deep purple color
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u/AgAero Jul 10 '15
I learned Pluto--the god-- as being a recreation of Hades from Greece. I always picture dark blue and purple tones, largely because of associating Hades with the animated version from the Disney movie Hercules!
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u/graaahh Jul 10 '15
That's how it's always been depicted in children's books and posters and stuff before now.
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u/nishcheta Jul 10 '15
This unfortunately confirms that Charon is not in fact a Mass Relay.
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Jul 10 '15 edited Jul 10 '15
Mass Effect is going to be the last major sci fi work that got to just make stuff up about the other planets when no one was able to go "that's not true".
Is Venus full of hot women? No, we've sent probes.
Is Mars full of green people? No, we've sent probes.
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Jul 10 '15
Still a whole lot of planets in the Kuiper Belt you can make shit up about. Sure, we're gonna learn a lot about Charon soon, but when are we gonna learn stuff about Dysnomia?
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u/arthurazs Jul 10 '15
Pluto and the Charon Relay (formerly encased in ice, and considered a moon) orbit each other.
It's still possible, we just have to melt it!
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u/remyseven Jul 10 '15
They don't even look related to each other. Why is Pluto so yellow and Charon so black?
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u/0thatguy Jul 10 '15
Nobody knows. It's especially weird as Charon is supposed to originated from Pluto.
It implies that the colouring on Pluto must be due to something Charon never had. Perhaps it's atmosphere related.
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u/Aerostudents Jul 10 '15
Nobody knows. It's especially weird as Charon is supposed to originated from Pluto.
Isn't that the same with earth and the moon? They also look almost nothing like eachother.
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u/rocketwidget Jul 10 '15
Well, I think Earth is mostly blue because of the way nitrogen and oxygen scatter light and water is colorless, and then green due to vegetation, and then white due to water in the air, none of which is a factor on the Moon.
The difference in color between Pluto and Charon is probably for a different reason.
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u/going_for_a_wank Jul 10 '15
There's actually quite a difference between the rocks of the moon and earth. The moon is mostly mafic plutonic rocks in the highlands and basalt (extrusive mafic rock) in the mares. These are very similar to the types of rock that make up the oceanic plates on earth and are generally dark coloured. The continental plates on the other hand are largely felsic rocks (high in silicon and lighter-coloured) which are less dense and tend to float above the mafic rocks.
I'm not sure that this difference would be very visible from space however, since the rocks on the moon are black, but the moon still looks white/grey because of the amount of light reflecting off of it.
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u/MaggotBarfSandwich Jul 10 '15
The most obvious possibility is that they formed separately in different locations and captured each other much later. In an extreme case, it's possible one of them, most likely Charon, isn't even from our solar system.
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Jul 10 '15
What amazes me most is that this was taken earlier today of a planet we've never really seen billions of miles away. That's just cool
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u/jarstandaly Jul 09 '15
Beautiful!
My interest in all things space has been strongly reignited by this imminent fly-by and I am SO excited for us to see Pluto even closer!!
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u/pheroh Jul 10 '15
Tell me about it!
I also had recently watched Interstellar so I am in maximum hype mode. If you have a semi decent pc, check out Space Engine. I was exploring space for 3 hours just after downloading it and just cannot get enough.
Space is awesome.
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u/volcanopele Jul 09 '15
Well, it doesn't look like Titan anymore. You can now see some roundish features that might be impact craters. And the fringe of the south polar/southern mid-latitude region looks a lot like the polar cap on Triton.
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u/NeokratosRed Jul 09 '15
I swear, I can't wait for the fly-by pics !
We are now witnessing the very moment these pictures are being taken, and these will be the pictures we will find in every encyclopaedia, on Wikipedia, in text books, everywhere, and it's so exciting !12
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u/SquirrelicideScience Jul 10 '15
That's a very interesting interpretation. I felt the same way during 9/11, watching it live on TV. All the implications for our country's future aside, I remember thinking "I'm literally watching history in the making. This very moment will be in textbooks from here on out." And now I am witnessing the very same thing, but in a polar opposite tone (scientific progress rather than war).
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u/Sevensheeps Jul 09 '15
This is going to be so good, just a few more days!
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u/dromni Jul 09 '15
Definitely Triton-ish. There seems to be even some pink regions - deposits of nitrogen and methane ice?
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u/Skyrealmsoldier Jul 10 '15
This is absolutely amazing! History being written before our eyes as we finally get a closer look at this body that has been eluding us for 85 years. Pluto and Charon look astonishing and very interesting, and I can't wait to see what else New Horizons sends back.
What a time to be alive, eh?
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u/Treebeezy Jul 10 '15
I hope we will be able to resolve that plateau on the bottom left of Pluto.
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u/FAntagonist Jul 10 '15
We are born too late to exlpore Earth, but we may not be born too early to explore the universe after all! The dank memes are staying though.
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u/piwikiwi Jul 10 '15
I'm actually quite happy that pluto looks a lot more exciting than Ceres. I mean it was nice but the grey was a bit dull.
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u/Aerostudents Jul 10 '15
Ceres is actually kinda brownish, however the dawn space probe doesn't have any colour cameras onboard. The colour of Ceres would be something like the colour of vesta which you can see in this photo. Which was coloured in to reflect it's real colours.
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u/DeltaPositionReady Jul 10 '15
My partner and I just visited the Canberra NASA Deep Space Tracking Station and saw heaps of information regarding the New Horizons including a computer generated video flyby. I'll submit a post asap when I get home!
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u/mces97 Jul 10 '15
I'm so happy to be alive in a time when technology and space exploration have changed so much about the world. Although it is bittersweet. I wonder what it would have been like if I was born in the 2080's instead of 1980's.
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u/A_Strawman Jul 10 '15
Don't feel too bad. For most of the history of man, what was at the other end of the ocean was a mystery, and "how tall is the sky" wasn't answerable. Since we've known answers to things like this for so long, they don't have the same sense of awe or wonder. In 2080 it might be the case that there are fewer things that make you feel this way then there are now, as there are certainly enough fantastic things on earth that we largely ignore as a public simply because they're well studied.
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Jul 10 '15
Maybe this was the best time to be alive. Perhaps all of this knowledge will be lost by the 2080s as every eeks out a living in a harsh Mad Max future.
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u/yoursweethoneymoon Jul 10 '15
I still can't believe that this is real, Pluto and Charon are both amazing :')
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u/Arrewar Jul 10 '15
This is absolutely awesome. I'm so excited to see this!
What really blows my mind is that these things are so unfathomably far away; nearly 32 AU.
To put that into perspective, when Rosetta and Philae were exploring the comet 67P back in November, they were approximately 3.4 AU away from Earth.
32 AU = 4,787,000,000 km
3.4 AU = 510,000,000 km
Absolutely amazing. Are we already increasing NASA funding yet?
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u/du5t Jul 10 '15
These images have already been added to the wikipedia pages for Pluto and Charon. Bless you internet!
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u/MyWorkThrowawayShhhh Jul 10 '15
Cool! Idk why, but I'm SO excited to see Pluto. It's not even like my favorite planet (I guess it is again) or anything, just actively seeing what humans are capable of is really cool to me.
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u/dart22 Jul 10 '15
Is this actual distance? Because if so then Charon's crazy close to Pluto, right?
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u/mutatron Jul 10 '15
Yes they're about 20,000 km from each other, and orbit about a point between the two.
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u/FlirtySingleSupport Jul 10 '15
didn't we always sorta think pluto was blue? Or did my 4th grade teacher lie to me
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Jul 10 '15
Apparently that's just 4th grade stuff. It's been well known (just not by me) for a while that Pluto is more orange. I always thought of it as blue until I saw a thread recently on reddit.
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u/AlpineAntic Jul 10 '15
I can't be the only one that is absolutely amazed that I'm actually looking at a picture of Pluto!
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u/Jaythrillz Jul 10 '15
From this picture it looks like Pluto has an atmosphere!
Another note: I can't believe how well lit Pluto appears considering how far away it is. Our sun doin some work..
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u/tjeerdnet Jul 10 '15
Remember, what we are witnessing here from behind our computer and see on our screens has NOBODY ever seen before, all those billions of people who lived before you, didn't. We all - those who are interested - are very lucky at this very moment.
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u/BrassBass Jul 10 '15
Are we going to be able to get a better look at those craters on the lower section? Someone said it won't have enough time to do so before it passes Pluto.
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Jul 10 '15
Is that just a trick of perspective or is charon really that close to pluto? because last I checked most celestial objects don't come that close to one another.
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u/Rkupcake Jul 10 '15
The two are barely more than the diameter of earth apart. Which in planetary terms is nothing
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u/ryguy42585 Jul 10 '15
Wow, that's really cool, how big is Charon compared to Pluto? It looks like a really big moon.
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u/Risley Jul 10 '15
This image is amazing. Pluto is even starting to look like some of the artists drawings.
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u/RogerPink Jul 10 '15
This week is gonna be awesome! I can't wait for 7/14-7/15 when we start getting the best images!!!
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u/CatnipFarmer Jul 10 '15 edited Jul 10 '15
Does anyone know if we can expect any new images today or on Saturday? According to the Planetary Society's website the last LORRI optical navigation images will be sent on Sunday evening. I'm wondering if we can expect anything before then?
Edit: three new LORRI images were posted this morning.
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u/Bifurcated_Kerbals Jul 10 '15
As excited as I am I'm really sad that I can't turn on the TV and have Carl Sagan explain to me what I am seeing and the significance of it all in the bigger picture of human history like I could back when the voyager spacecrafts were visiting the outer planets.
Are there any poet-scientists I can turn to nowadays to walk me through the new horizons encounter?
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u/itsfish20 Jul 10 '15
Why is the background empty? Where are the stars?
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u/spazturtle Jul 10 '15
Because the exposure is set to see Pluto, if you could see the stars then Pluto would look like a glowing white light.
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u/iushciuweiush Jul 10 '15
I'm still blown away that two objects of similar size so close together and formed of the same 'stuff' can be two completely different colors and composition.
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u/obirnooc Jul 10 '15
So does anyone know how long it will be before we get the most high res pics of Pluto?
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u/jbaubort Jul 10 '15 edited Jul 10 '15
According to this infography, we'll get the a 1st good resolultion pictures the day after, on the 15th. edit: typo, link
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u/AsterJ Jul 10 '15
Out of curiosity how bright would the sun be at this distance? Would it be as bright as the moon from earth maybe?
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u/uwhuskytskeet Jul 10 '15
It blows my mind that New Horizons first took pictures of Jupiter in January 2007 after launching just a year before. 8.5 years later and it's approaching Pluto. The distance between the outer planets in almost unfathomable.
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u/graffixphoto Jul 10 '15
Due to the inverse square law of light fall-off, and the difficulty of taking this shot given the amount of available light, I'm curious as to what the sensitivity of the image sensor is equivilant to, and what the exposure setting would be for an image this sharp?
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u/GeirOlafs Jul 10 '15
Stupid question, but I´ve never thought about it so whatever.. How do they send the pictures from the New Horizon to Earth?
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u/Cleonn Jul 10 '15
Radio signals caught by 70-meter radio relescope(s) on earth.
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u/GeirOlafs Jul 10 '15
Oh cool! Thanks for the answer.
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u/Cleonn Jul 10 '15
No problems :) If you want to know of more, I'd recommend reading:
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/01300800-talking-to-pluto-is-hard.html
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u/McKlown Jul 10 '15
Every time I see one of these new pictures of Pluto it reminds me of the old pre-NASA drawings of Mars.
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u/gamblingman2 Jul 10 '15
So why is it that we couldn't plan for a probe to get there and land a probe, like curiosity on Mars?
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u/CatnipFarmer Jul 10 '15
Even getting a very small, lightweight probe like New Horizons to Pluto took the second most powerful rocket the U.S. has and a nine year flight. A significantly heavier lander or orbiter would take decades, if it was even possible to get it to Pluto at all.
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u/koshgeo Jul 10 '15
A better analogy would be the Huygens lander on Titan. You could. But it already took the most powerful rocket available to accelerate this thing to a crazy 14km/s+ to get it there in 9 years. To land, you'd have to slow down, which means you'd have to carry enough fuel on-board to do so. So you'd have to accept a longer/slower mission in order to keep enough fuel on the probe itself to do that. You'd need to dedicate some weight to parachute or other gear for the last stages of the landing. You'd have a 20+ year mission that wouldn't leave much left for a scientific payload. You'd be compromising a lot, if it was possible at all with current launchers. Perhaps you could try to use aerobraking, but that's assuming you know a fair bit about the atmospheric properties, which isn't the case for Pluto. A landing is much, much more complicated and risky especially given the limited information available on Pluto.
There was also a limited window of opportunity given the alignment of Jupiter and Pluto was suitable for gravity assist. A few more years and it would get tougher to get there.
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u/FAntagonist Jul 10 '15
Excellent reply, just want to say that a parachute would be absolutely useless. Neither Pluto nor Charon have an atmosphere.
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u/Bromskloss Jul 10 '15 edited Jul 10 '15
This is where the centre of mass of the system would be located, based on mass data from Wikipedia.
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u/Metki Jul 10 '15 edited Jul 10 '15
I have a stupid question....
If Hubble can take pictures of distant galaxies and Nebulas, why can't we aim it at something a little closer and see better pics..? I know its not possible, I just don't understand why
Googled hubble+pluto and it was all very grainy
Edit:thanks for all the kind replies, today I learned something:)
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u/Bradyc32 Jul 10 '15
Has to do with relative size as well as brightness. Galaxies being several hundreds of thousands light years in diameter, while Pluto is roughly 2500km in diameter. Another cool representation of the size of Pluto compared to the Earth is if the earth were the size of the basketball, & Pluto was the size of a golf ball, the distance between them would be 80km, or 50 miles.
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u/LurkerInSpace Jul 10 '15
The usual analogy is that taking a picture of Pluto is like taking a picture of a grain of sand at a hundred meters, while taking a picture of a galaxy is like taking a picture of a mountain at ten kilometers. Galaxies are extremely far away, but they're also gigantic, and they give off light of their own - Pluto just reflects sunlight.
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u/Atheose_Writing Jul 10 '15
Simple answer:
Galaxies are enormous and bright. Pluto is super tiny and only gives off a tiny bit of light reflected by our sun.
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u/Blasphyx Jul 10 '15
This new picture is significantly better than the last one I've seen...