Starship Asterisk*

Beyond wrote:
ARF! It would seem that we have run out of puns for Pluto.

Beyond wrote:I'm NOT counting There's no more names available. Pluto needs more named offspring circling's

Nitpicker wrote:

Beyond wrote:
I'm NOT counting There's no more names available. Pluto needs more named offspring circling's

Maybe New Horizons will find some (if we don't count out chickens).

neufer wrote:

[b][color=#0000FF]New Horizons LOng Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) composite image showing the detection of Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, cleanly separated from Pluto itself. The frame on the left is an average of six different LORRI images, each taken with an exposure time of 0.1 second. The frame to the right is the same composite image but with Pluto and Charon circled. NASA/Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute[/color][/b]

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Nitpicker wrote:
Maybe New Horizons will find some [moons] (that aren't already known of).

geckzilla wrote:
That seems so amazingly unlikely the more I think on it. I also find it hard to believe that the Pluto system is much more complicated than we've already discovered it to be but finding new moonlets seems a lot more likely than crashing into one.

• Well rings & dust, at least, had the New Horizons folks spooked for quite a while.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons#Pluto_flyby wrote:

[b][color=#0000FF]Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter (VBSDC)[/color][/b]

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<<During and after closest approach, the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter (VBSDC) will search for dust, inferring meteoroid collision rates and any invisible rings. Built by students at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the Student Dust Counter will operate continuously through the trajectory to make dust measurements. It consists of a detector panel, about 18 by 12 inches (460 × 300 mm), mounted on the antisolar face of the spacecraft (the ram direction), and an electronics box within the spacecraft. The detector contains fourteen PVDF panels, twelve science and two reference, which generate voltage when impacted. Effective collecting area is 0.125 m². No dust counter has operated past the orbit of Uranus; models of dust in the outer Solar System, especially the Kuiper belt, are speculative. VBSDC is always turned on measuring the masses of the interplanetary and interstellar dust particles (in the range of nano- and picograms) as they collide with the PVDF panels mounted on the New Horizons spacecraft. The measured data shall greatly contribute to the understanding of the dust spectra of the Solar System. The dust spectra can then be compared with those observed via telescope of other stars, giving new clues as to where earthlike planets can be found in our universe. The dust counter is named for Venetia Burney, who first suggested the name "Pluto" at the age of 11.>>

orin stepanek wrote:
In less then 500 days; closest encounter opperations begin! http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/

owlice wrote:Here's a proposed LEGO set that could use some love and support.

Click to view full size image

orin stepanek wrote:
New horizons is getting busy! http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/20140106.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto_%28mythology%29 wrote:
<<Pluto (Greek: Πλούτων, Ploutōn) was the ruler of the underworld in classical mythology. The earlier name for the god was Hades. In ancient Greek religion and myth, Pluto represents a more positive concept of the god who presides over the afterlife. Ploutōn was frequently conflated with Ploutos (Πλοῦτος, Plutus), a god of wealth, because mineral wealth was found underground, and because as a chthonic god Pluto ruled the deep earth that contained the seeds necessary for a bountiful harvest. The name Ploutōn came into widespread usage with the Eleusinian Mysteries, in which Pluto was venerated as a stern ruler but the loving husband of Persephone. The couple received souls in the afterlife, and are invoked together in religious inscriptions. Hades by contrast had few temples and religious practices associated with him, and is portrayed as the dark and violent abductor of Persephone.>>

NASA Science News for Jan. 14, 2014
Eight years after it left Earth, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is approaching Pluto. The encounter begins less than a year from now.

FULL STORY:http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/sc ... jan_pluto/

VIDEO:

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Chris Peterson wrote:
It would require a truly bizarre sort of logic to conclude that a "dwarf planet" isn't also a "planet".

In the context of the original passage, "dwarf planet" would be a poor choice, since the comparison was being made between the distance that New Horizons has traveled in its goal to reach a particular planet, and the distance that other probes traveled to reach different planets.

This provides an excellent example of just why "planet" is more useful without a rigorous definition.

Ann wrote:I've come late to this party, but... Chris, what you said back in 2005 seems to imply that there is an unknown number of planets in our own solar system, doesn't it?

Nitpicker wrote:Still, I do like the idea of outsourcing a head of state, especially one whose continued existence is only through inaction.