Posted on 07/06/2015 6:50:08 PM PDT by lbryce
At last, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is sending back images of Pluto that look (slightly) better than brown blobs or pixel art. The probe has delivered a new batch of images from between 7.8 million to 9.2 million miles away, or close enough that the dwarf planet is starting to reveal some meaningful detail. There's still no explanation for those giant spots, but it's evident that there's a "continuous swath" of dark ground near the equator. And if you'd like pictures that are better than fuzzy, you might not have to hold out for too much longer. New Horizons should be considerably closer when it recovers from its recent glitch, and the expected July 14th flyby should produce a ton of extra detail
(Excerpt) Read more at engadget.com ...
Well, just the other day a shock and sense of dread went through the NASA control at New Horizons when the craft switched to its back up computer. The huge distances takes about 4 and a half hours to receive confirmation that all seemed well. You travel billions of miles and nearly a decade of flight time and as you enter thee sweet spot BOOM! the thing breaks down. But fortunately thing are running smoothly for the July 14 point of rendezvous.
You are now in control pluto ping
Isn’t there some paperwork or something to fill out before it’s a planet again?
Definition of a planet: a planet is a body that orbits the Sun, is massive enough for its own gravity to make it round, and has “cleared its neighbourhood” of smaller objects around its orbit.
So how is Pluto not a planet?
“From 1992 onward, many bodies were discovered orbiting in the same area as Pluto, showing that Pluto is part of a population of objects (which is called the Kuiper belt). This made its official status as a planet controversial, with many questioning whether Pluto should be considered together with or separately from its surrounding population. Museum and planetarium directors occasionally created controversy by omitting Pluto from planetary models of the Solar System. The Hayden Planetarium reopened—in February 2000, after renovation—with a model of only eight planets, which made headlines almost a year later.[59]
As objects increasingly closer in size to Pluto were discovered in the region, it was argued that Pluto should be reclassified as one of the Kuiper belt objects, just as Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta eventually lost their planet status after the discovery of many other asteroids. On 29 July 2005, the discovery of a new trans-Neptunian object, Eris, was announced, which was thought to be substantially larger than Pluto. This was the largest object discovered in the Solar System since Triton in 1846. Its discoverers and the press initially called it the tenth planet, although there was no official consensus at the time on whether to call it a planet.[60] Others in the astronomical community considered the discovery the strongest argument for reclassifying Pluto as a minor planet.[61]
IAU classification
The debate came to a head in 2006 with an IAU resolution that created an official definition for the term “planet”. According to this resolution, there are three main conditions for an object to be considered a ‘planet’:
1) The object must be in orbit around the Sun.
2) The object must be massive enough to be rounded by its own gravity. More specifically, its own gravity should pull it into a shape of hydrostatic equilibrium.
3) It must have cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.[62][63]
Pluto fails to meet the third condition, because its mass is only 0.07 times that of the mass of the other objects in its orbit (Earth’s mass, by contrast, is 1.7 million times the remaining mass in its own orbit).[61][63] The IAU further decided that bodies that, like Pluto, do not meet criterion 3 would be called dwarf planets.
On 13 September 2006, the IAU included Pluto and Eris and its moon Dysnomia in their Minor Planet Catalogue, giving them the official minor-planet designations “(134340) Pluto”, “(136199) Eris”, and “(136199) Eris I Dysnomia”.[64] If Pluto had been given one upon its discovery, the number would have been about 1,164 instead of 134,340.
There has been some resistance within the astronomical community toward the reclassification.[65][66][67] Alan Stern, principal investigator with NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto, publicly derided the IAU resolution, stating that “the definition stinks, for technical reasons”.[68] Stern’s contention was that by the terms of the new definition Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Neptune, all of which share their orbits with asteroids, would be excluded.[69] His other claim was that because less than five percent of astronomers voted for it, the decision was not representative of the entire astronomical community.[69] Marc W. Buie, then at Lowell Observatory, voiced his opinion on the new definition on his website and petitioned against the definition.[70] Others have supported the IAU. Mike Brown, the astronomer who discovered Eris, said “through this whole crazy circus-like procedure, somehow the right answer was stumbled on. It’s been a long time coming. Science is self-correcting eventually, even when strong emotions are involved.”[71]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto#Classification
It was redefined as something other than a planet.
A change that Pluto neither knows nor cares about, and which changes absolutely nothing except in the minds of a few human beings.
National Geographic has Pluto on its cover, but only a short article on Pluto near the end.
It says that the girl in England who first suggested the name Pluto was the niece of the man who came up with the names Phobos and Deimos for the two moons of Mars (he wasn't the man who discovered the moons). And that Mickey's dog wasn't named Pluto until a year after the planet was.
So how is Pluto not a planet?
It doesn't meet that third criteria that I've bolded.
Is the unsharpness caused by atmosphere or are they using a Holga camera?
That didn't stop Hillary Clinton from being named after Sir Edmund Hillary.
So how is Pluto not a planet?
...
The decision to make Pluto a dwarf planet was made by a small group of astronomers (not planetary scientists) and their criteria were arbitrary. Planetary scientists seem to have an issue with it.
Its unsharpness is because it is a round object. If it was a pointed planet it would be sharp at some locations.
...and as you enter thee sweet spot BOOM! the thing breaks down....
Plutonians are doing the same thing to our spacecraft that Martians have been doing for decades.
Looks like my stomach ulcer. I have an alien world in my stomach. Who knew? Gotta chance my meds.
Was a member of the Astronomical Society of Las Cruses, NM. Got to meet Clyde Tombaugh several times as he was a member also, sitting next to him a a meeting it was funny he had the largest Walt Disney Pluto watch on!
I’m loving these articles on Pluto; can’t wait til next week.
Do we have a real Pluto ping?
The media will tell you whether you are to believe it is a planet or not.
Pluto’s orbit is also significantly tilted relative to the orbits of the (major) planets. Plus, if Pluto were a planet, a few hundred other objects would also be planets, some of which are much smaller than it is, and which incidentally also haven’t cleared their orbits of things, just like Pluto hasn’t.
Bill Nye the settled science guy or Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
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