The Cowboy
Member
Fire photon torpedo!!!.
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Pluto New Horizons |OT| New images. Pluto/Charon still geologically active
- Thread starter GK86
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Fire photon torpedo!!!.
Space Monster
Neo Member
YES
Only 16 months to go to get all that delicious data!
Only 16 months to go to get all that delicious data!
Slayer-33
Liverpool-2
When your data link only has a bandwidth of 1kbps (on a good day), things take a while to get through.
The Sum of Zero
Member
It downloads at 1.5 kilobytes(?) a second, does no one read the thread?
EDIT: Beaten
eyeball_kid
Member
That guy is a nut for America.
Great to hear a healthy status report.
Great to hear a healthy status report.
The Sum of Zero
Member
Success!
EDIT: Nice surprise, AP News had an alert about it.
EDIT: Nice surprise, AP News had an alert about it.
Space Monster
Neo Member
The NH team have been working towards this moment for more than 25 years. A few more months is not long to wait.
BrokenFiction
Member
They have to say all that shit to get the bare pittance of funding that NASA can beg for.
The Sum of Zero
Member
Defunding NASA over the years has been criminal. Imagine where we'd be if they were properly funded.
NihonTiger90
Member
It's beaming it back. Very, very slowly.
DrForester
Kills Photobucket
Thanks for reminding me - I just fired up the Nasa Eyes app and selected the Juno Mission and used the fast forward feature to get this shot..
Got to visit Lockheed Martin in Colorado where they built that, they had a replica of one of the solar arrays. That thing is MASSIVE (the panels are 30ft long). It's going to make all the stuff we got from Cassini look antiquated.
Pagusas
Elden Member
Very slowly. Read up on NASA's deep space network
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Deep_Space_Network
iceblade997
Member
This is so awesome. Really a once in a lifetime thing right here. To think we can send out a probe that far away accurately continues to amaze me.
It's going to be glorious as the first high res images come in - even the currently circulating pic is amazing.
It's going to be glorious as the first high res images come in - even the currently circulating pic is amazing.
Agreed.
It's a crying shame that people are so busy looking down at their phones that they've forgotten to look up. What's out there is fucking amazing, and it's real.
uncelestial
Member
I was wondering today after New Horizons' long mission, how much time *hasn't* passed on it, relative to us. It has been traveling at 8.5-miles-per-second rates for 9 years now. Even at that minute level of time dilation, that's enough time that maybe it has added up to New Horizon's being a perceivable amount of time younger than we are.
BrokenFiction
Member
It's a victim of it's own success. Space is almost blase these days. Sci-Fi movies don't help because that's what people expect now.
Owning a telescope is a pretty great thing that I wish more people had the opportunity to enjoy. I have just a modest 10" Dobsonian, which is brilliant for observation, and ok for astrophotography. I've had it for some years now, and I still enjoy merely looking up at the moon, never mind Jupiter, Saturn or any number of the DSOs.
I can't wait for my daughter to be old enough to hang out with me on the deck stargazing (we already do moon, Venus and Jupiter, since they're easily viewable in the sky unaided.)
Mango Positive
Member
Are they going to, or have they released an image of our sun from Pluto? I'd love to see that.
iceblade997
Member
Doing so would burn out the camera. Besides, unlike the Voyager probes, NH's cameras aren't on a moveable platform.
Yup, NH is collecting 100 times the data it could send to Earth in a day.
Here is a website that shows you signals to different crafts including Voyager. I don't know how to read it, but it looks cool: http://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html
Check out the different options too.
Here is a website that shows you signals to different crafts including Voyager. I don't know how to read it, but it looks cool: http://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html
Check out the different options too.
Mengy
wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
Not that this will be entirely accurate, but using Space Engine you can get a pretty good approximation of what that would be like.
For example, Jupiter as seen from the surface of one of it's moons, Io:
Here is how Jupiter looks from the surface of Europa:
Now, this shot came out with the Sun looking brighter than I expected, although the amount of light hitting Pluto itself is low, so I don't know if this is accurate or not, but here is the Sun from the surface of Pluto in Space Engine:
And here would be how Pluto looks from the surface of Charon, you can see how dark both of them are due to their distance from the Sun:
Now if only we had tourist resorts on each of them to compare these pics to reality, LOL.
LuFel
Member
Awsome pic.
eyeball_kid
Member
Yeah, it's one of the cooler sites NASA has produced. Basically the waves going up are sending signals, and coming down are receiving. The shaky waves are carrying data, while waves that look like nicely-curved sine waves are carrier signals to establish a communication link. NHPC (dish 63 in Madrid) is currently assigned to New Horizons transmissions.
Mengy
wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
Nice, I've got a 10" Dobsonian too! I need to clean my mirror off, it's dusty right now.
Pluto's Extraplanetary Exploration Expedition?
Charles Foster Kane
Rosebud
Thanks to this thread I now see Pluto in Pluto.
I still see the heart, but Pluto's there's too.
I still see the heart, but Pluto's there's too.
eyeball_kid
Member
I didn't expect to see so many women in the team. That's so cool !
Where can I find a video of the team's reaction ? I missed it live
Yup, the NH team is 25% women! The team reaction might be on YouTube?
Actually yes, they knew that. In fact, they knew a few things about the atmosphere and stuff. Heck, there were ways to measure Pluto's atmospheric pressure! Don't get me wrong, what they had was very little in comparison to now and not nearly as precise, overall your point stands!
It's not going that fast. It's currently traveling at about 15 km/s, or 9 mi/s relative to the Sun. At this speed the Lorenz factor still is just 1.0000000012517314. Meaning, one second for New Horizons would be 1.0000000012517314 seconds for the Sun.
This means that it would take 25 years to get 1 second behind on the sun's time.
uncelestial
Member
Just answering my own question here.
New Horizons is going 30,800 mph, or 13.6794 km/sec. It has been doing so for 9.5 years, or 299,791,000 seconds. According to this calculator, 0.31209 seconds more time have passed for us than have passed for New Horizons based on speed.
Gravitational time dilation has probably added a bit more time as well, but that was constantly varying as NH floated through space, got a gravity assist from Jupiter, etc. It might be about half a second younger than us, though, all told.
eyeball_kid
Member
Alice makes me smile. It's also good to have someone on the team that can humanize things, and it's awesome to have a female leading the spaceflight operations...I think this might be the first major mission to do so?
DrForester
Kills Photobucket
Time dilation is very small until you get up to the higher speeds. I think with speed and gravity taken into account that an astronaut on the ISS would age 0.01 second less than people on Earth if they were up there for year.
Something interesting that many don't know is that the GPS satellites have to be constantly updated and monitored because of time dilation. GPS timing is so precise that a single day without the constant monitoring and updating would result in GPS units being off by 6 miles. But unlike the ISS, the GPS satellites are going faster than we are, since they are much further away than the ISS.
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