Pluto

[Esper]

It's not a planet.

The New Horizons spacecraft is due to pass by Pluto in less than a week. (Expected to flyby on Tuesday, July 14 at 11:49:57 UTC). It will be the first time that we'll get close enough to see the dwarf planet in good detail and study its composition. Currently, thanks to New Horizons, the best images we have of Pluto are these:

Spoiler:

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What do you think of all this? What do you expect or hope we'll learn from this flyby? What do you think of these long-term space exploration endeavors? What about the future of space exploration? Just anything about space and planets and stuff.

 

[DarkSkys]

At least we'll find out it really is a planet or a star.

 

[Sir Codin]

It isn't a planet and there really isn't that much of a need for a spacecraft to confirm this. Here's an article that does a decent job of explaining WHY Pluto is not a full-on planet and why it doesn't meet the criteria to be considered one:

https://www.universetoday.com/13573/why-pluto-is-no-longer-a-planet/

 

[Esper]

At least we'll find out it really is a planet or a star.

Well, we know it's not a star. Something's got to be a lot more massive, among other things, to be a star. But, like, we don't know necessarily what Pluto is made of in much detail or what its features are like, not like we do with the 8 planets in the solar system.

 

[Nah]

What happens after it passes by Pluto though?

It's dwarf planet. That's what it is classified as, like Ceres.

Isn't Ceres a big asteroid and not a dwarf planet or am I mixing it up with something else?

 

[Her]

What happens after it passes by Pluto though?


Isn't Ceres a big asteroid and not a dwarf planet or am I mixing it up with something else?

It's an asteroid which is big enough to be classified as a dwarf planet, iirc. It's big enough to affect it's own gravitational pull and have shaped itself over time, which makes it a dwarf planet, but it's still an asteroid caught in the big ass asteroid belt.

I'm very interested in what is essentially the biggest scheduled scientific event of the year - I don't have any exact thoughts on the subject, but there's always an element of grandeur when discovering more about the universe.

 

[Sir Codin]

What happens after it passes by Pluto though?


Isn't Ceres a big asteroid and not a dwarf planet or am I mixing it up with something else?

Well, if I remember Newton's Laws correctly, it'll do the same thing the Voyager probes did: keep going outside of the Solar System at a relatively constant pace until it hits something.

Idk, it's purpose if I'm reading correctly was to give us images of the outer reaches of the Solar System, including Pluto.

 

[DarkSkys]

Well, we know it's not a star. Something's got to be a lot more massive, among other things, to be a star. But, like, we don't know necessarily what Pluto is made of in much detail or what its features are like, not like we do with the 8 planets in the solar system.

It's dwarf planet. That's what it is classified as, like Ceres. What do I think about Pluto and New Horizons...? Yes. yes yes yeyeey YES I am excited a lot! I've been waiting for this for months and months now and I am so excited to think that in a few days we're gonna see Pluto properly. I'm surprised and sad that more people don't know or care about this. It's a historic moment and very exciting.

A couple of years ago I heard them change it from a planet to a star (cause they could never reach it)

 

[Somewhere_]

I think they will find alien dwarves that will come and destroy earth with a giant space hammer.

In all seriousness though, I think this information will be really interesting. I want to find out more about the planet.

 

[Pinkie-Dawn]

Was there an internet outcry about astronomy "ruining" their childhood by declassifying Pluto as a planet? It would give us a reason not to pay any attention to these type of people in other subjects.


Why would New Horizon be passing by Pluto rather than landing on it to learn more info about the dwarf planet? I haven't been following NASA news as of now, so I don't know if New Horizon's mission is to go beyond the Milky Way.

 

[Sir Codin]

Probably because right now we don't know too much about what the actual surface of Pluto is like (and by extension what kind of effect it will have on man-made equipment), it's less expensive right now to just make a probe to take pictures of it from a distance (not to mention having another thing out in space for sentient extraterrestrial life to find that clues them in that we exist), and that it's difficult to even get precise calculations of the orbit of a celestial body 7.5 billion kilometers away from earth so we can even get near it at the right time (let alone land something on its surface).

There's a reason why we use the phrase "it's not rocket science" to explain mundane tasks.

 

[Esper]

Why would New Horizon be passing by Pluto rather than landing on it to learn more info about the dwarf planet? I haven't been following NASA news as of now, so I don't know if New Horizon's mission is to go beyond the Milky Way.

From what I read, the NASA team has had to periodically adjust the flight path of New Horizons over the last ten years (!) to correct for changes in Pluto's expected path. So Pluto is so far away that we're not even always sure exactly where it is (at least for delicate purposes like this mission).

The other thing is that in order to land on the surface of something you have to be going relatively slow. New Horizons is literally the fastest moving human-made machine ever made. Trying to land on Pluto at the speeds it's going is like trying to land a bullet safely on a watermelon by firing it with a gun. It's also too fast to get into orbit and use the atmosphere to slow down. And the only other way to slow down is by using fuel in the opposite direction, but that would require a lot of fuel to be carried, so much so that the whole project wouldn't be possible. (I don't know the exact math about it, but the more fuel you want your spacecraft to have, the more massive it is and the harder it is to get it into space in the first place.)

 

[Lotus the Cat]

I'm always down for learning/discovering more about the universe. The lack of understanding (lots of assumptions) about Pluto prior to this mission means we might find out some very interesting things. National Geographic channel are airing a special on it in a week so I'll be tuning in to that for a summary.

A couple of years ago I heard them change it from a planet to a star (cause they could never reach it)

Can't tell if serious...? A planet would never be reclassified as a star unless the original classification was way off mark. Stars are balls of nuclear fusion, planets are not.

 

[Seth Rollins]

2 hours left guys! Today is the day they reach Pluto ^^

 

[Leviathan]

The pictures so far are quite astounding! I can't wait to see what else Nasa releases. Gonna lurk on Nasa's twitter all day.

 

[Esper]

Here it is, the last image before New Horizons turned all its cameras and thingies on Pluto:

Spoiler:

It's crazy to think that we'll have even more detailed images in the upcoming weeks. That is, if everything went okay during the flyby. Small, small chance that it didn't.

I hope all of this leads to more funding for NASA and more space missions.

 

[Pinkie-Dawn]

Here it is, the last image before New Horizons turned all its cameras and thingies on Pluto:

Spoiler:

It's crazy to think that we'll have even more detailed images in the upcoming weeks. That is, if everything went okay during the flyby. Small, small chance that it didn't.

I hope all of this leads to more funding for NASA and more space missions.

And the internet has done its job editing it:

Spoiler:

It's quite amazing.

 

[Lotus the Cat]

So I ended up watching that documentary about the mission and there were some very cool bits of information:

• Lots of people mistakenly think Pluto was named after the Disney character. The planet is named after the Roman god of the underworld (Roman Hades). Disney then named the dog after the planet.
• The New Horizons craft is powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator that only produces about 200 W of power. This is because they would be travelling too far from the sun to use solar power, they needed something small and if the generator produced much more power it could damage the sensitive equipment used elsewhere on the craft.
• The 200 W power source meant that when the craft needed to take measurements etc. the whole craft had to rotate (not enough power to use an electric motor to rotate seperate parts).
• Any instructions sent to New Horizons needed to be done so at least a week prior due to the processing time of the computers on the craft.
• Due to the 200 W power supply during the Pluto fly-by New Horizons had to rotate to face the planet, which meant facing away from Earth. This meant during the entire 2 hour fly-by the scientists at NASA had no idea whether or not the mission was a success. If it failed, they would have found out too late to rectify anything.
• When New Horizons was launched the orbit of Pluto was not fully known and they were still working it out years into the mission. If they didn't get it right they may have missed Pluto altogether.

It's a pretty amazing feat when you consider a lot of the challenges they had to work with.

 

[Saintscrew7]

Jus to be annoying... what do they tought about our mental health? So many years trying to teach us that Pluto is the last planet on the solar sistem. And a few years agsomeone (I did not follow the story) found a new planet bigger than Pluto, THAT made Pluto a star. That exploded my mind. So many years wasted? Pluto remains a Planet to me...

 

[Esper]

[*]The New Horizons craft is powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator that only produces about 200 W of power.

If I'm not mistaken it was a radioisotope of plutonium. :)

Jus to be annoying... what do they tought about our mental health? So many years trying to teach us that Pluto is the last planet on the solar sistem. And a few years agsomeone (I did not follow the story) found a new planet bigger than Pluto, THAT made Pluto a star. That exploded my mind. So many years wasted? Pluto remains a Planet to me...

I'm not sure what mental health has to do with any of this. Do you mean about people thinking Pluto is a planet and then suffering mental health issues because it was changed to a dwarf planet? I'm sorry if that's the case, but I don't think many people are going to be suffering because of that, and if they are then I hope they seek help.

Also, again, Pluto - whether you think of it as a planet or dwarf planet - is not a star, never was a star, and never will be a star.