NASA spies weird glow from Pluto's FRIGID pole NASA's New Horizons space probe has beamed back photos that seem to show that dwarf planet Pluto has a strange effulgent spot on its pole. Pluto's icy pole The pole shows up as a bright spot on the right of the image The spacecraft is more than 60 million miles away from the tiny world. New images released by NASA at a …
We won't get them back for two weeks due to the distances involved and the 1Kbps bandwidth for data transmission.
Bah, that is still faster than my first dial-up modem that ran at 300 bps. I managed to edit with Emacs through it, although some patience was needed, and an optimized /etc/termcap.
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They didn't say they were the first to fly by each individual planet, just that they were the first to fly by *all* of them. This is true - if slightly confusing when stated in the context of a Pluto fly-by: one could wish that they would make up their minds.
A Definite case of premature ejaculating comments here
Quote
" The spacecraft is still more than 60 million miles away from the dwarf planet"
NOT GOT THERE YET
"The US has been the first to flyby every planet of the Solar System "
You got to go past it before you can claim to have a fly by
Some Fly by
John Grunsfeld Your Wife must be Pissed off if your this prematurely ejaculating comments in the Bedroom as well
Paris because Probably she has seen so much prematurely ejaculating com..............
The major issue is more of a semantic one...
Either only "planets" count, in which case this sentence is true since the demotion of Pluto, or the dwarfs planets count as well, in which case Eris, Makemake and a few others are still waiting for their flyby..
Stern and many planetary scientists do not accept the demotion of Pluto, which was done by only four percent of the IAU, most of whom are not planetary scientists, and which was rejected by an equal number of professional astronomers. Ironically, Stern is the person who first coined the term "dwarf planet" but he did so with the intention of designating a third class of planets in addition to terrestrials and jovians and not to refer to non-planets.
"technically it's a binary system since the mass of Charon (described as "the size of Texas" by Stern) is large enough to perturb the Plutonian orbit significantly"...
"binary system" isn't well defined, especially for planets. If perturbation of orbit is the deciding factor then earth-moon is also a binary planet system (unless someone defines "significantly" arbitrarily to include pluto but not earth) . If we take the barycentre as a defintion then we get a problem with Jupiter (The Sun-Jupiter barycentre lies outside the sun, so Sun-Jupiter would be a star-planet binary system)
hardware that lasted that long and still works in a hostile environment, comms that reach halfway across solar system and reasonable hope that it go further. Beats my last 2 DVD players for reliability. Despite the carping at who went past all planets first, the yanks must be bream full of hope for great science data despite the distance scale. My coats the one with the Complete Tangler in pocket
Since when?
Pluto has a magnitude that ranges between 16.5 and 13.65. Most people can see down to a magnitude 5 while some can see a 6 or maybe a 7. Which means at it's brightest, Pluto is still 6 factors dimmer that the best naked eye can see.
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