The Register's resident space boffin: All you need to know about the Pluto mission Dwarf planet or not, every schoolchild still learns the name "Pluto" as the ninth and final Sun-orbiting body alongside the eight undisputed planets - and now a spacecraft of the human race has finally visited the remote iceworld. From the very first data that reached the ground, the colossal effort was clearly worthwhile, …
"New Horizons also took images of the system for several months on approach, in case a last-minute tweak in trajectory was needed to avoid an unknown obstacle."
And you expect to have driverless cars by 2020?
They almost hit my space craft. Clearly no intelligent life in this solar system!
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I will take umbrage at the cold dwarf thing. It seems obvious that it has internal activity and therefore is actually a proper planet rather than a lump of icy rock and shouldn't be shunted into the whole 'lump of solar detritus' category. Besides Carl Sagan managed to get nine planets on the plaque of the Pioneer missions, (and he was a clever bloke). Modern day people are going to just confuse the aliens with their PC revisionism.
"It would be glorious and awesome? Possibly involve lot of beer and bacon sarnies?"
Sadly, despite all the hoppy and bacony goodliness, neither ingredient nor any combination thereof is going to lift an Atlas V into orbit let alone to escape velocity. Lager, on the other hand, is far more gassy and may just be possible. Especially XXXX sheeps piss mixed with artificial "bacon bits" Much experimentation has already been carried out with a lower energy substitute known as "cola" with a Mentos catalyst.
"it’s already clear that at least part of the surface of Pluto is young. Planets and moons are continually being bombarded by debris, so the older a surface is, the more impact craters it has on its surface."
Alternate theory?
Pluto has cleared it's zone, resulting in few later impacts, therefore, it is a planet.
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I have some umbrage to take at various reportage of 'initial survey complete', from various places. Without meaning to pick on this one in particular. Yes this is the planet/not planet thing but whichever way you fall on that fence it's wrong to say so.
I being pragmatic fall on whatever side of the fence gets another grand piano-probe sent to the basically as-large (and heavier) Eris, and you can call that 10 planets, or 8 and two biggish-but-not-really ones.
I don't plan on being alive at Sedna periapsis but you could throw that in too.
Naturally the answer is to pool the tritium from reg keyrings to make a nuclear power supply for a future LOHAN derivative. With the added bonus, for outer solar system being that it has its own lights?
A fantastic achievement, and a fascinating article.
I wish I could say the same about Monday evening's The Sky at Night on the same topic.
For some reason they repeatedly called Pluto's moon Sharon. It's news to me that the Lord of the Underworld had an Essex girl rowing the boat across the Styx. Even though they're astronomers, they surely can't be unaware of the mythical origins of the names. "Charon" starts with the Greek letter chi, which I've always assumed to be a slightly aspirated "k" sound. It's not as if there isn't a major world religion that's spelt with chi.
I have a vested interest: like many other people in the world, my given name starts with this phoneme. Am I going to have to call myself "Shris" in future?
Another couple of points. Why do TV presenters think the best way to show a picture on my TV screen is to show me their sodding tablet? If they can get the picture on the tablet, they can show it full-screen on the TV. And why does The Sky at Night have to be presented by irritating hyperactive nitwits? Doubtless highly-qualified nitwits, but the point remains.
Apparently 'Charon' (the moon) is pronounced 'Shar-on', not 'car-on' (like the ferryman) because its discoverer wanted to name it after his wife (Charlene), but the naming conventions of the IAU say that objects shouldn't be named after spouses or mistresses. Charon was chosen, as a compromise, as it sounded a bit like his wife's nickname 'Char', hence the pronunciation, and also the Greek/Roman god confusion (Charon is the ferryman of the dead in Greek mythology, Pluto is the Roman god of the underworld, so maybe we should start referring to the planet as 'Hades').
Shall we reach a deal: you don't refer to yourself as 'Shris' and James Christy doesn't refer to his wife as 'Karlene'.
Interesting; I didn't know that. So presumably James Christy's surname is pronounced 'Shristy'?
Although Charon is the ferryman in Greek mythology, it seems the Romans used the same name. Apparently Virgil called him Charon in The Aeneid (I confess I haven't read it in Latin). If so, the Pluto/Charon pairing is legitimate.
Kubla - I have to agree. That "Sky at Night" special showed that the BBC can and will drag everything down to "Horizon" standards (I will not refer to it as "New Horizon" for obvious reasons!) Who were those dribbling baboons presenting, and did all those really tired scientists think they were being interviewed for childrens' television? Thanks for nothing, BBC.
Loyal - It is, and always will be, Charon with a "K" to me, regardless of what the discoverer, no matter how clever, thinking with his prick thought he was doing.
"And why does The Sky at Night have to be presented by irritating hyperactive nitwits?
To get down wif da yoof? He looks like a rumpled bag of spuds and she looks like a 12yo in an adults body. I've really gone off the show since Patrick left the planet, but I keep watching in the forlorn hope that the producer will grow some balls and accept that The Sky at Night is NOT a CBeebies production.
There's very little atmosphere on Pluto, frozen out it would form a thin frosting across the planet rather than obscuring some stonkingly big geology.
It's a shame New Horizons didn't carry a magnetometer as that would have probably detected any magnetosphere driven by a convecting interior.
'Active geysers of nitrogen had been found on Neptune’s moon Triton in 1989, but the source of heat for that was thought to be tides.'
I'm pretty sure the consensus is that Tritonian geysers are driven by solar warming of a dark layer under the translucent nitrogen crust since they cluster close to the moon's subsolar point in the mid-southern hemisphere. The energy needed to perform the large scale reworking of Triton's crust is almost certainly tidal, the moon has plenty of tidal energy from its retrograde orbit around Neptune.
I wish you critics would watch S@N more and try to understand its ethos before taking cudgels to it. Education, information, entertainment.
Lintott is a good scientist and a crap presenter but actually very good when interviewed.
Maggie A-P is probably a good scientist, very enthusiastic but needs someone to tell her that dressing like an Alice in Wonderland character is not suitable for this type of 'adult' tv. A 'slow down' button would be very useful. Rumors that she's actually Patrick Moore dressed in a Bubbles outfit have little basis in fact ...
Having to fit PL and MA-P on screen to show an iPad displaying a 'high resolution image' was just pointless in the extreme.
Pete Lawrence tries to be sensible and valiantly brings near sanity to the proceedings.
It *was* great that they did a special for what was, by any measure, a momentous event and any such publicity has to be good.
However, like a poor Pizza company, S@N tries hard but fails with delivery too often ... ok, where do I get a cudgel?
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