Posted on 07/13/2015 5:45:36 PM PDT by radu
LAUREL, Md. — With less than a day to go before NASA's New Horizons mission zooms past Pluto, scientists reported on Monday that the dwarf planet isn't quite as dwarfish as they thought — in fact, it's the largest known solar system object beyond Neptune.
How large? Based on New Horizons imagery, its diameter is 2,370 kilometers (1,473 miles), plus or minus 20 kilometers (12.4 miles). That makes it almost 30 miles wider than Eris, the dwarf planet whose discovery led to Pluto's downfall as the "ninth planet" back in 2006. Eris' diameter has been measured to be 2,326 kilometers (1,445 miles), plus or minus 12 kilometers (7.5 miles).
*snip*
Stern said New Horizons' observations also confirmed that Pluto has a polar ice cap, and that the composition of that cap is different and more methane-rich than the dark bands and splotches of material ringing Pluto's equator. The piano-sized probe's instruments also have detected atoms of nitrogen escaping from the dwarf planet's atmosphere, Stern said.
*snip*
Because Pluto is almost 3 billion miles away, it will take 4.5 hours of travel time at the speed of light for the all-clear signal to reach Earth. If and when that moment comes, sometime around 9 p.m. ET Tuesday, it will set off a cheering, jumping-for-joy celebration at APL's Mission Operations Center.
"Tomorrow evening's going to be a little bit of drama," Stern said Monday.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
Kinda like my ex wife.
“Because Pluto is almost 3 billion miles away, it will take 4.5 hours of travel time at the speed of light for the all-clear signal to reach Earth.”
The speed of light, for those that don’t know, is 186,000 miles per second!
:-)
LOL!
The craft will not be communicating with earth during the closest approach but will continue sending back data from it for months.
Its kind of cool keeping an eye on the real time simulation with NASAeyes. http://eyes.nasa.gov/
Too bad writers can’t relate to people well.
Pluto is: 2,370 kilometers (1,473 miles)
Our moon is: 1,737.10 km (wiki sucks too, can’t even show miles)
So it’s about 1/4 larger than our moon. Or 125% the size of our moon.
Thought I’d have some fun with this. Figures here were probably fudged a bit for easier understanding.
I calculate the time for light to travel here from 3 billion miles at 186,000 mps.
It actually works at as 4.48 hours, a smidgen more at 5 places.
This amounts to 72 seconds short of the 4.5 hours they mentioned.
During that extra 72 second, the message traveled 13,392,000 miles past earth.
All of a sudden....that seems so slow.
This settles it. Time to make Pluto a planet again.
The Solar system has a lot of empty space...
http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html
after scrolling right a bit an icon appears at the lower right which will allow one to travel at light speed.
And our moon, at approximately 2100 miles across, is about 1/4 the diameter of Earth (~8000 miles in diameter) — about from New York City to Idaho. In other words, if the Earth was where the moon is, it would be 4 times as wide as the moon in the sky.
Yeah, but only on the straightaways.
News writers rarely seem to be able to relate to people very well, especially with science-related subjects.
I’ve always been amazed that Pluto was even discovered. It’s so small and at the time it was discovered, we didn’t have the telescopes we have today.
All of a sudden....that seems so slow.
The speed of lightning is surprisingly slow—but sudden!
Seeing the photos that have come in the past few days showing the features, I say heck yeah!
Yeah, but only on the straightaways.
Lol! But light does actually "curve" around extremely massive objects due to gravitational effects. It's called "gravitational lensing".
*applause*
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