back to article FROSTY MISTRESS of the Outer System: Pluto yields to probe snapper

NASA's New Horizons spaceship, which has been on its mission to Pluto for nine years now, is expected to start snapping photos of the icy planet today. The probe has travelled roughly 3 billion miles away from Earth for its closest approach with the dwarf planet expected to take place on 14 July this year. Boffins at the U.S …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    Interesting stuff

    At least it's not Uranus on the web...

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Billion

    Is that a scientific billion or an American short billion. It might be better to give the distance in AU rather than the somewhat ambiguous billion.

    1. Martin0641

      Re: Billion

      Well since the founding fathers invented science as they rode velociraptors to work, their billion is the real billion and all pretenders to the throne are silly people.

    2. Bleu

      Re: Billion

      Russell Crowe made a comment about banking 'bail-outs' seven or so years, he said something like 'Why don't they divide it up and just give x thousand dollars to every member of the population.'

      He was widely ridiculed for the comment, particularly in places where, until recently, 'billion' had the correct definition of 10 to the twelfth power, not the ninth.

      I checked his calculation, it was correct on that basis.

      A great testament to short memories and the ignorance of so many journalists.

      The mockery on that point from US journalists can, of course, be excused, but there wasn't much.

      For those from other places, where there was a lot of mockery, it just displayed their ignorance.

      1. BillG
        Pint

        Re: Billion

        Russell Crowe made a comment about banking 'bail-outs' seven or so years, he said something like 'Why don't they divide it up and just give x thousand dollars to every member of the population.'

        There's something to be said for that. Most of the bailout money did go directly to the richest 1%. When you do the math, for the total amount the U.S. Congress spent on "bailouts", you could give each household in the USA $14,000.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Billion

          "Most of the bailout money did go directly to the richest 1%"

          One wonders what would happen if some of the "quantitative easing", i.e. printing money, was given to the unemployed and people on low incomes.

          Forget 55 inch TV sets, a lot of it would be spent on food, clothes and basic necessities - which would result in a boost to local economies. Even things like getting cars fixed and houses insulated would add real economic value.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Billion

            Jeez guys, we have a probe approaching PLUTO and this thread degenerates into a bunch of "Colonel Blimp--Mathematician" kvetching about who's billion is actually a billion?

            Priorities gentlemen, priorities...

        2. Bleu

          Re: Billion

          BillG, I checked that too.

          I understated Crowe's statement, it was something like 'why not just give everyone a million dollars?', but that was only for the earliest round of handouts to the banksters in the US.

          We had

    3. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Billion

      "Is that a scientific billion or an American short billion."

      10^9

      It's the traditional British 10^12 that's the odd one out.

      1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
        WTF?

        Re: Billion

        > 2015

        > People unsure about billion being anything else than 10^9 are still posting on the Internet

        Just get with the times, FFS.

      2. mr.K

        Re: Billion

        Other countries have billion also and use it correctly. Numeration by groups of six is the only thing that makes sense. If you insist on having it mean groups of three then you should skip thousand and let million be ten to the power of three, billion be to the power of six etc.

        On the other hand, it wouldn't be the first word (or set of words in this instance) that have lost touch with its origins and that is language I suppose. I just object to the long scale being the odd one out. So I will continue to use it correctly in my language and incorrectly in English :)

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales

        You have to love wikifiddlers sometimes, they make lists and maps so you don't have to.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Billion - @mr. K

          On the one hand there is you, and on the other the International System of Weights and Measures, or SI to give it the usual abbreviation. I am afraid that international standards tend to trump personal preference.

          The root "milli" in million has nothing to do with 106. It means one thousand. The word "million" is a backwards formation from the Italian "millione", literally lots of thousands. The naming system million, billion etc. is arbitrary. Bi- and tri- are Greek, but quad- and quint- are Latinate. One assumes that having got to 4, it was decided that a tettarillion sounded silly, so it would be Latin from then on. I imagine in the same way that using Latin for 2 and 3 would result in the odd sound duillion and trellion. (Names of numbers are often adjusted for convenience - e.g. the logical Russian for 40 would be the difficult "chetirdyesyat", so it has been replaced with "sorok")

          So all these terms are just more or less arbitrary names for powers of 10 that you just have to know. SI sensibly went with grouping in threes because it makes engineering units convenient - for integral values, not more than 3 digits plus exponent (999GW would have to be written 999000MW in a 6-based system).

          Nearly 50 years ago our maths teacher kept trying to persuade us that the "Imperial" system of weights and measures was superior to that "Metric" system because it was easier to do mental arithmetic with all those scales of 2,3,4,6,12,14,16 and 22. Of course, as soon as we discovered the slide rule and then the pocket calculator we realised that this was just special pleading. In the same way, the decimal system with unit groupings in the power of 103 is justified because it makes a lot more sense, not because somebody's imaginary number system goes mi, bi, tri, quad.

      3. Tom 7

        Re: Billion

        I have several old Astronomical books where a billion is as it should be and not the short changed american financial boast.

      4. Bleu

        Re: Billion

        Sorry, you are wrong. It is the US vulgar billion that is born of exaggeration and error. Every European language had it as ten to the twelfth.

        Of course, we in the east reckon in fourth powers of ten, so multiples of third powers are irrelevant.

        Much US english originates in error, from the fucked-up pronunciation of 'forehead', so that the little girl with the little curl rhyme doesn't work in most US english, to all of the morons pushing stupid prepositional usage, like 'based off' instead of 'based on', avoiding 'with' when it is perfectly correct, and using 'to' instead, never using the perfect verb tenses when they are not only correct, but add to clarity of expression, easy to name many more.

        'I could care less' is one of the most nonsensical vulgarities, someone reversed the sense to make the statement rubbish, but murricans probably don't even understand how that is a logical fallacy, while 'couldn't care less' is not.

        All (except for the fucked-up pronunciation of forehead), very recent or pretty recent innovations. The fuck-up of the pronunciation of 'forehead' is also recent and I gather not quite universal, but at least pre -WWII, the rhyme about the little girl who had the little curl was popular in the US, too, so it must have worked at the time.

        Read US literature, you won't find the other vulgarities I mention, until very recently.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Billion

      I doubt that anybody who has the first vestige of a clue about the Solar System could possibly be confused. The scientific billion is exactly the same as the American short billion, and the British billion hasn't been used for a long time.

      No, the problematic thing is the use of miles.

    5. Jonathan Richards 1
      Boffin

      Re: Billion

      Whichever side of the debate one started on, this question is now settled. Nobody should now be writing 'billion' and meaning '1012. The convention that billion=109, trillion=1012, etc. is now practically universal, by which I mean all practitioners use it. It is wise merely to remember that this was not always the case, when reading older documents.

      Ref: How many is a billion? [oxforddictionaries.com]

    6. cray74

      Re: Billion

      The short billion is used broadly through the English-speaking world, including the British Commonwealth* as well as the former USSR, Oceania, and Brazil, so there shouldn't be ambiguity unless you're trying too hard to show that you're not subject to the American cultural hegemony**. Only a smaller fraction of the world's population - primarily the Spanish-, French-, and Dutch-speaking regions - use long scale regularly.

      However, even the large population of short scale users is overshadowed by the third fraction of the world's population (including India, China, and Greenland) that have its own system(s).

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#mediaviewer/File:World_map_of_long_and_short_scales.svg

      *Hence the common use of short scale by The Register, BBC News, Guardian, and other British publications.

      **Canada has mixed long and short scale use stemming from its "See? We're not just politer Americans with fewer guns" policy. Either that or it's a Quebecois plot.

  3. Zog_but_not_the_first
    Devil

    That dog's got...

    Three heads!

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    My hat's off to these engineers

    Build something, write software for it, and in NINE years, you will discover whether it will work properly.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: My hat's off to these engineers

      Same as developing for any "new and improved" API then?

    2. Zog_but_not_the_first
      Pint

      Re: My hat's off to these engineers

      Absolutely. Trebles all round for this astonishing work.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Happy

        Re: My hat's off to these engineers

        "Build something, write software for it, and in NINE years, you will discover whether it will work properly."

        So kind of like your average SAP deployment? :)

        (OK, that was unfair.)

  5. Bleu

    It is exciting!

    Such a long wait, it is moving.

    As for an ionosphere, they must be joking. No doubt this is the presage to earnest articles about a tiny amount of electromagnetic activity that may or may not have been detected.

  6. Little Mouse

    I had to check, but....

    ...thumbs-up to the El-Reg staffers for providing an actual New-Horizons-themed header pic.

    Can't wait for it to start sending back Better-than-Hubble photos.

  7. Sporkinum

    All I wanted was a PEPSSI, just one PEPSSI, and she wouldn't give it to me! Just a PEPSSI!

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

      Sergei, please.

  8. Extra spicey vindaloo

    When it took off.

    Pluto was a planet with a single moon.

    Now it's not a planet and has at least 5 moons. They should be more worried about getting new horizons through Pluto's system safely.

    1. Bleu

      Re: When it took off.

      I believe the mission organisers have been paying close attention to that, at least one of the moonlets was discovered in obversations to assist the craft.

  9. Dr Patrick J R Harkin

    Hello, mission control?

    New Horizons here. Look, I don't quite know what's happened but I'm here, where you said the planet would be and it isn't. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Oh, there's some little dwarf thingy, but my memory banks definitely say there should be a planet around here somewhere...

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
      Terminator

      Re: Hello, mission control?

      "YOU LIED TO ME! I'M TURNING BACK!!"

      1. Alister

        Re: Hello, mission control?

        MSG-2015-01-26,01:32:27-FRM-New-Horizons-MSGBODY-WARNING-imminent-failure-of-ALPHA-ECHO-THREE-FIVE-unit-detected-suggest-replacement-earliest-opportunity-MSGENDS

  10. Primus Secundus Tertius
    Unhappy

    Rather cold there

    I am surprised at the statement about an atmosphere of nitrogen.

    Pluto at ca 30 AU, so sunlight 1/900 of earth intensity. So for temperature, T**4 is 1/900, making T about 1/5.5 of Earth. Say (300 Kelvin/5.5) or 55 K.

    Hydrogen and helium, but not much else.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Rather cold there

      Remember that at its liquefaction temperature in air, nitrogen has a vapour pressure of 1 bar.

      I can't find the vapour pressure of nitrogen at 55K, NIST has a link that only goes down to the triple point (63.14K). At the triple point, however, the pressure is a considerable 0.125 bar, so I imagine that a thin nitrogen atmosphere at 55K is entirely reasonable.

  11. Thomas Smith

    billions

    Another reason why the U.S. should give up the idiotic measurement system used and go with the standard, which is the metric system. One reson for the US not switching is the belief of many of its folks that the current system is the same as in the Bible.

    The U.S, back in the 1950s, should have been at the forefront of the conversion to the standard system

    1. CarbonLifeForm

      Re: billions

      No, that's not the reason. It's just customary and comfortable, albeit anachronistic.

      Like with the Brits having a royal family.

      Ouch. Sorry 'bout that. :-)

  12. ShadowDragon8685

    The scientific world got to have their metric notations. We Yankees convinced them to use our billions. Get over it.

    About the probe.... Well, this ought to be interesting. I've never agreed with deplanetizing Pluto, always felt it should've been grandfathered in. Still, it'll be nifty to see what they can see.

    From what they said about closest approach, I'm guessing this probe isn't going to be inserting itself into orbit of pluto but is just going to swing by on a parabolic path. Where's it going after that, assuming it doesn't crash into a moon?

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