Starship Asterisk*

orin stepanek wrote:
have you voted?
February 14, 2013
Help Name Pluto's New Moons
The discoverers of “P4” and “P5” are inviting the public to help select permanent names for Pluto’s newest and smallest moons. Like Pluto's three other moons – Charon, Nix and Hydra – they need to be assigned names derived from Greek or Roman mythology. Voting ends Feb. 25. +Vote Here
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/index.php

Unless significant new hazards are found, expect NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft to stay on its original course past Pluto and its moons, after mission managers concluded that the danger posed by dust and debris in the Pluto system is less than they once feared.

The New Horizons team recently completed an 18-month study of potential impact hazards – mostly dust created by objects hitting Pluto’s small satellites – the spacecraft would face as it speeds some 30,000 miles per hour (more than 48,000 kilometers per hour) past Pluto in July 2015. The team estimated that the probability of a mission-ending dust impact was less than 0.3 percent if the spacecraft followed the current baseline plan, far below some early, more conservative estimates. So, with the concurrence of an independent review panel and NASA, the project team expects to keep New Horizons on this baseline course, which includes a close approach of about 12,500 kilometers (nearly 7,800 miles) from the surface of Pluto. ...

orin stepanek wrote:Looks like the winners were Vulcan and Cerberus; but I haven't seen anything official in naming these two moons!

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) is announcing that the names Kerberos and Styx have officially been recognised for the fourth and fifth moons of Pluto, which were discovered in 2011 and 2012. The names were submitted to the IAU by the leader of the team responsible for the discovery, who had called for the help of the general public in an open contest that attracted a substantial number of participants.

BMAONE23 wrote:Considering the ambient temperature of Pluto
Perhaps it really is a cold day in hell

I hope this doesn't mean that my first girlfriend shows up on my doorstep

Click to view full size image 1 or image 2

Pluto and Charon: New Horizons LORRI composite image showing the
detection of Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, cleanly separated from Pluto.
Credit: NASA/JHU-APL/SwRI

---

NASA’s Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft, using its highest-resolution telescopic camera, has spotted Pluto’s Texas-sized, ice-covered moon Charon for the first time. This represents a major milestone on the spacecraft’s 9½-year journey to conduct the initial reconnaissance of the Pluto system and the Kuiper Belt and, in a sense, begins the mission’s long-range study of the Pluto system.

The largest of Pluto’s five known moons, Charon orbits about 12,000 miles (more than 19,000 kilometers) away from Pluto itself. As seen from New Horizons, that’s only about 0.01 degrees away.

“The image itself might not look very impressive to the untrained eye, but compared to the discovery images of Charon from Earth, these ‘discovery’ images from New Horizons look great!” says New Horizons Project Scientist Hal Weaver, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md. “We’re very excited to see Pluto and Charon as separate objects for the first time from New Horizons.”

The spacecraft was still 550 million miles from Pluto – farther than the distance from Earth to Jupiter – when its LOng Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) snapped a total of six images: three on July 1 and three more on July 3. LORRI’s excellent sensitivity and spatial resolution revealed Charon at exactly the predicted offset from Pluto, 35 years after the announcement of Charon’s discovery in 1978 by James Christy of the Naval Observatory.

“In addition to being a nice technical achievement, these new LORRI images of Charon and Pluto should provide some interesting science too,” says New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute. New Horizons is viewing Pluto and Charon at solar phase angles (the angles between the Sun, Pluto and spacecraft) much larger than can be achieved from observatories located on or near the Earth, potentially yielding important information about the surface properties of Charon and Pluto – perhaps the existence of an overlying layer of fine particles, for example.

“We’re excited to have our first pixel on Charon,” Stern continues, “but two years from now, near closest approach, we’ll have almost a million pixels on Charon –and I expect we’ll be about a million times happier too!”

orin stepanek wrote:Looks like Lorri is kept pretty busy! http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/2013/20130823-late-in-cruise-and-a-binary-ahoy.html wrote:
New Horizons: Late in Cruise, and a Binary Ahoy
By Alan Stern, 2013/08/24 09:16 CDT

<<A scientific conference sponsored by the New Horizons project to review everything known about Pluto and its satellites, their origin and evolution, and to hear informed scientific predictions about what New Horizons will find. More than 170 scientists registered for the five-day conference, which was held at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, where New Horizons was built and from which it is now operated. The conference, "The Pluto System on the Eve of Exploration by New Horizons: Perspectives and Predictions," was covered by science press who attended and wrote and tweeted about it; it was extensively blogged by New Horizons Deputy Project Scientist Kimberly Ennico; and will result in a special issue of Icarus, the premier research journal of planetary science.

I will list a few of my favorite findings and predictions:

• Hubble Space Telescope evidence that Pluto’s smaller moons vary wildly in brightness on irregular schedules, indicating these tiny worlds orbiting Pluto may be tumbling chaotically.
  
  Telescopic stellar occultation evidence that Pluto’s atmosphere is still thickening, and won’t collapse before New Horizons arrives.
  
  New predictions that Pluto could sport an interior ocean of water and active surface geology, possibly including geysers or volcanoes.
  
  A prediction that Charon may, from time to time, have a transient atmosphere created by the importation of fresh volatiles by comet impacts from the Kuiper Belt.
  
  And predictions that Pluto’s atmosphere may contain low-altitude clouds or even ground fogs, which excited some atmospheric physicists there but worried some geologists who equate clouds and fogs with curtains hiding the surface from view.>>

geckzilla wrote:
I predict a string of nonsensical and emotional articles about Pluto's status as a planet overshadowing any new discoveries unless there's aliens with hovercars flying around the surface.

http://www.universetoday.com/104362/the-cyber-myth-that-just-wont-die-see-mars-as-large-as-a-full-moon/#more-104362 wrote:
The Cyber-Myth That Just Won’t Die: See Mars as Large as a Full Moon!!!
by David Dickinson on August 27, 2013

<<Ten years ago this week, the planet Mars reached made an exceptionally close pass of the planet Earth. This occurred on August 27th, 2003, when Mars was only 56 million kilometres from our fair planet and shined at magnitude -2.9. Such an event is known as opposition. This occurs when a planet with an orbit exterior to our own reaches a point opposite to the Sun in the sky, and rises as the Sun sets. In the case of Mars, this occurs about every 2.13 years.

But [a myth also] arose in 2003, one that now makes its return every August, whether Mars does or not. You’ve no doubt gotten the chain mail from a well-meaning friend/relative/coworker back in the bygone days a decade ago, back before the advent social media when spam was still sorta hip. “Mars to appear as large as the Full Moon!!!” it breathlessly exclaimed. “A once in a lifetime event!!!” Though a little over the top, the original version did at least explain (towards the end) that Mars would indeed look glorious on the night of August 27th, 2003 … though a telescope.

But never let facts get in the way of a good internet rumor. Though Mars didn’t reach opposition again until November 7th 2005, the “Mars Hoax” email soon began to make its rounds every August. Co-workers and friends continued to hit send. Spam folder filled up. Science news bloggers debunked, and later recycled posts on the silliness of it all. Now, a decade later, the Mars Hoax seems to have successfully made the transition over to social media and found new life on Facebook.

No one knows where the Mars Hoax meme goes to weather the lean months, only to return complete with all caps and even more exclamation points each and every August. Is it the just a product of the never ending quest for the almighty SEO? Are we now destined to recycle and relive astronomical events in cyber-land annually, even if they’re imaginary?
Remove this ad

Perhaps, if anything there’s a social psychology study somewhere in there, begging the question of why such a meme as the Mars Hoax endures… Will it attain a mythos akin to the many variations of a “Blue Moon,” decades from now, with historians debating where the cultural thread came from?

Here are the facts:

• -Mars reaches opposition about every 2.13 Earth years.
  
  -Due to its eccentric orbit, Mars can vary from about 56 million to over 101 million kilometres from the Earth during oppositions.
  
  -Therefore, Mars can appear visually from 13.8” to 25.1” arc seconds in size.
  
  -But that’s still tiny, as the Moon appears about 30’ across as seen from the Earth. You could ring the local horizon with about 720 Full Moons end-to-end, and place 71 “maxed out Mars’s” with room to spare across each one of them!
  
  -And although the Full Moon looks huge, you can cover it up with a dime held at arm’s length…. Try it sometime, and amaze your email sending/Facebook sharing friends!
  
  - Mars NEVER gets large enough to look like anything other than a star-like point to the naked eye.
  
  -And finally, and this is the point that should be getting placed in all caps on Facebook, to the tune of thousands of likes… MARS ISN’T EVEN ANYWHERE NEAR OPPOSITION in August 2013!!! Mars is currently low in the dawn sky in the constellation Cancer on the other side of the Sun. Mars won’t be reaching opposition until April 8th, 2014, when it will reach magnitude -1.4 and an apparent size of 15.2” across.

Still, like zombies from the grave, this myth just won’t die. In the public’s eye, Mars now shines “As big as” (or bigger, depending on the bad hyperbole used) as Full Moon now every August. Friends and relatives hit send, (or these days, “share” or “retweet”) observatories and planetariums get queries, astronomers shake their heads, and science bloggers dust off their debunking posts for another round. Hey, at least it’s not 2012, and we don’t have to keep remembering how many “baktuns are in a piktun…”

What’s a well meaning purveyor & promoter science to do?

Feed those hungry brains a dose of reality.

There are real things, fascinating things about Mars afoot. We’re exploring the Red Planet via Mars Curiosity, an SUV-sized, nuclear powered rover equipped with a laser. The opposition coming up next year means that the once every 2+ year launch window to journey to Mars is soon opening. This time around, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission and, just perhaps, India’s pioneering Mars Orbiter Mission may make the trip. Launching from Cape Canaveral on November 18th, MAVEN seeks to answer the questions of what the climate and characteristics of Mars were like in the past by probing its tenuous modern day atmosphere.

And as opposition approaches in 2014, Mars will again present a fine target for small telescopes. As a matter of fact, Mars will pass two intriguing celestial objects next month, passing in front of the Beehive cluster and — perhaps — a brightening Comet ISON. And after a series of bad oppositions in 2010 and 2012, oppositions in 2014 and 2016 are trending towards more favorable. In fact, the Mars opposition of July 27th, 2018 will be nearly as good as the 2003 approach, with Mars appearing 24.1” across. Not nearly as “large as a Full Moon” by a long shot, but hey, a great star party target.>>

orin stepanek wrote:i can't recall how many time i recieved that Mars email! Knock on wood; so far I haven't recieved it yet this year!

orin stepanek wrote:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/mission/whereis_nh.php
Round trip light time between Earth and New Horizons is now at 7&1/2 hours!

neufer wrote: Hard to be impressed after Voyager I (~35 hour round trip light time).

5.3 AU distance to Pluto is more relevant perhaps.