I've met optimistic people before, but I think this takes the cake PS: Don't stare, the skates might self destruct if they think their cover is blown. Anyways, back to science!
More pix for our science fix: Another surface shot of Pluto, south-western edge of the white heart: The small moons Nix and Hydra (obviously not side-by-side in real life. Nix is shot in enhanced colour, Hydra in black-and-white): The awesome keeps on coming. More pictures due this Friday.
Awesome stuff right there. Ever since I was a kid I've always wondered what Pluto looked like; now I know. It's amazing what people can do when we work constructively instead of destructively. So what's next? This time next year Juno should enter a polar orbit around Jupiter. There's also a proposal to develop a submarine to explore the hydrocarbon oceans of Saturn's moon Titan. Although it's just a proposal and is therefore a decade away (if it gets the go-ahead), the idea alone makes my geek side all tingly.
I grew up with a copy of the Reader's Digest Great World Atlas, 1962 edition (it was the Dutch version of course, but I still have a copy today, in English, because it was everything a good atlas should be: accessible for ordinary people, informative and beautifully printed and illustrated). I remember as a five-year old browsing it, fascinated by pictures of the star map and the solar system: I remember Pluto being depicted (top left) as a blank sphere far away from the warming glow of the sun, tracing its lonely arc in the darkness of space. In the illustration it has no moons. They hadn't been discovered yet (nor indeed had been many of the smaller moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune; Saturn's rings were still merely a few wide bands and a Cassini division). Pluto had no features. I realised it was very far away, and used to wonder what it would look like up close. Now we have pictures so detailed I can practically imagine walking on the surface. /mind blown.
Only to find that Curiosity became self aware, repaired all the other rovers, and they've claimed the planet for themselves.
Tony Padilla came across as bitter that a subject of a (slightly) different discipline of science to his was receiving a lot of attention. Professor Michael Merrifield made what I though was an excellent point about the silliness of whether or not Pluto was a planet and how arbitrary changes potentially diminish science's authority. I kinda have a geek crush on Meghan Gray - it's a brains and beauty thing, so we'll say no more about that.
Fun facts: the $700 million cost of the New Horizons project is less than a tenth of the amount Microsoft wrote off after its takeover of Nokia. Apple could fund fifteen New Horizons missions with just the profit from its last three months. And AT&T's proposed takeover of DirecTV is close to 70 times more expensive than the humble Pluto probe. Quite amazing.
I don't think he was bitter, I reckon he was just having a bit of a dig at the astronomers he shares the office with. As for Gray, well I'd imagine half of the channels subscribers would be in agreement with you. Quite depressing. Get thee to the demote thread.
I'd go out on a limb to say that despite the awesomeness of what we're seeing, people still don't really grasp the distances at play here. Distances in our solar system are measured in astronomical units (AU). One AU is 93 million miles, or 150 million km, which is the mean distance between the earth and the sun. Check out the link below (and make sure you read the instructions) and you will see just how far away the sun is from the earth. This works well if you leave the page on autoscroll (and if you have a few minutes to kill). Astronomical Unit Visualisation Now that you know what an AU is, you can start to think about the distance between us and Pluto. Pluto is approx 39AU from the sun, and it takes about 4.5 hours for the sun's light to get there (when it's nearest the sun... about 5.5 hours when it's farthest). It is therefore approx 38AU from earth, which is about 4.7 billion miles.
