MYSTERIES of remote ICE WORLD PLUTO: New pics BAMBOOZLE boffins

Re: Why all the complexity? Why so fractal?

But if you saw some alien geometry with impossible angles and dark corners that could not have been designed by a human eye, loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours ... you are in R'lyeh!

Re: "Is it just me or is that last close-up actually the Isle of Wight?...."

Time Warp

This is why experts interpret these images.

Some of them even have doctorates and stuff.

Impact hyposthesis

I'm tentatively inclined to agree with you re impact hypothesis for the area shown in the pics.

The first thing that struck me was that it looks like those are convection patterns on the frozen plains, accompanied by a large melt flow towards the bottom right of the pic.

The aligned ridges, better seen in the second pic, look more like folds than dunes, and there also appear to be several mucking great faults/cracks in the cratered region below the fold region.

The light shaded region to the top right of the frozen plain might be ejecta but, on a body as small as Pluto, a lot of any ejecta would likely have a velocity => Pluto's escape velocity, and that which didn't might orbit the body a few times before coming back down just about anywhere, not just near the impact site.

But then who knows?

There's less cratering on Charon than I would have expected, and more uneven too.

Re: Dear {deity}

> "There is so much really interesting stuff coming up."

"When wasn't there, though?"

Well, in many centuries the "interesting stuff" usually verified the curse, "May you live in interesting times." It was interesting if you would die giving birth to your first or fifth child, interesting which disease would kill you by age 35, interesting which religion would bring war to your land, interesting whether the weather or pests would destroy your crops and bring famine, and so on.

The 18th and 19th Centuries were interesting in a different, better way because mankind started overcoming those millennia-old problems with things like innoculations and the electric light bulb, but I prefer "interesting" in the form of "I get to see the first flyby of Pluto (and Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune)." That's because the latter is also accompanied by humanity finally moving beyond subsistence farming, hunting, and gathering. Today, I have access to most of the knowledge of humanity in my hand, and four days ago I took a quick trip of 1500 miles sitting beside carriage-sized engines with more mechanical horsepower than some ancient kingdoms - and I did that for a couple days' wages.

I'll take that last kind of interesting stuff over the interesting stuff that filled most of humanity's history.

Re: Dear {deity} @Will Godfrey

In understand. You will miss the Jihad Show, then....

Re: One Caveat To Keep In Mind

@ChrisG - An oblique squishing impact event seems to be the consensus. I think the factor that is there in the discussion but fully explored might be the effect of impact heating , low gravity and rapid cooling in a slow motion dance of variously slushy stuff (our customary gaseous materials) and hard stuff (water ice?) some of which might have cracked off original surface and been variously flung up, sunk and propelled before settling down back in the deep freeze. The relative densities and phase transitions of these materials during such a temperature adventure as each bit experiences a different 'profile' over different routes would make a fascinating study for someone with a lifetime to squander! Then they could move on to considering how all that stuff will sublimate and travel across the landscape over time while the water ice does its usual tricks of crawling around with a mind of its own!

Re: I wonder what the skiing is like!

Hmmm.....

“Now, you didn’t get much in-suit training Earthside. We didn’t want you to get used to using the thing in a friendly environment. The fighting suit is the deadliest personal weapon ever built, and with no weapon is it easier for the user to kill himself through carelessness. Turn around, Sergeant.

“Case in point.” He tapped a large square protuberance between the shoulders. “Exhaust fins. As you know, the suit tries to keep you at a comfortable temperature no matter what the weather’s like outside. The material of the suit is as near to a perfect insulator as we could get, consistent with mechanical demands. Therefore, these fins get hot — especially hot, compared to darkside temperatures — as they bleed off the body’s heat.

“All you have to do is lean up against a boulder of frozen gas; there’s lots of it around. The gas will sublime off faster than it can escape from the fins; in escaping, it will push against the surrounding ‘ice’, and fracture it … and in about one-hundredth of a second, you have the equivalent of a hand grenade going off right below your neck. You’ll never feel a thing.

“Variations on this theme have killed eleven people in the past two months. And they were just building a bunch of huts.

Come to think of it, the suit doesn't need to be an insulator except for the boots, but you have to get rid off the body heat indeed. Best would be to scoop up some ice and make it gas out, taking the heat with it, right?