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Pluto New Horizons |OT| New images. Pluto/Charon still geologically active

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M

Megasoum

Banned
hobblygobbly said:
Not with this or the curiosity rover or any interplanetary vehicle.

The reason is because you won't be able to even establish a connection, NASA can do it because it has access to the DSN (Deep Space Network), otherwise there is no way to communicate. Actual communication is not encrypted itself. NASA doesn't need it because nothing important is being sent (like secret data etc) and nobody will be able to access it in any way because they don't have access to the DSN. Theoretically, you could build a DSN yourself but that is incredibly expensive and impossible to hide due to size and the geographical placements they need to be in so it has a lot of political issues as well.

It's more probable to get unauthorised access to the DSN itself somehow. Even if countries like Russia or China managed to build their own DSN strong enough for these missions (and remember, these can't just be in their own political geography for proper coverage) to be able to communicate with interplanetary vehicles, it'll expose them (no way to hide who did it), and there's nothing to gain economically or scientifically considering that these rovers, probes, etc have instruments from collaboration with multiple countries. It'll just be an unnecessary political fallout with no gain for anyone. So while some countries have DSNs, it's not on the same level as NASAs, and even if they were, interfering with a NASA mission would expose you and gain you nothing.

Basically as a result for now it's a non-issue due to how the infrastructure works and the requirement for very specialised, large, expensive equipment to communicate that far. Even if a country managed to build a DSN that was able to communicate, it'll expose them and have a huge political issue and it would all be for nothing because space exploration is a very international collaborative effort, research and data is shared, instruments are made by multiple countries, etc. There is only one country I think in the world that would do it just to piss everyone off and that's North Korea but North Korea's not building a DSN any time soon. The international scientific community surrounding space exploration in any form is very collaborative so there's no incentive really for any country to be malicious.
Click to expand...

Unless you're Sam Neil...

51PEGZKY64L._SY300_.jpg
 
sono

sono

Member
Mengy said:
Yeah, but don't expect too many pictures until the end of the week, and even then pictures will be slowly trickling in over the next several weeks due to data packet limitations. Still, we should be in for some awesome revelations within a few days!
Click to expand...
Anyone know the data rate in bits/sec?
 
G

gutterboy44

Member
Holy shit! And I thought it was a bummer downloading FLAC albums back in the day.

On September 14, New Horizons will begin downlinking a "browse" version of the entire Pluto data set, in which all images will be lossily compressed. It will take about 10 weeks to get that data set to the ground. There will be compression artifacts, but we'll see the entire data set. Then, around November 16, New Horizons will begin to downlink the entire science data set losslessly compressed. It will take a year to complete that process.
Click to expand...
 
Pejo

Pejo

Member
So I'll admit, I'm not as up to date on space as I should be, but can someone please explain:

How the hell are we still controlling/communicating with this thing? Is it radio waves that travel ultra fast due to being in a vacuum or something? It blows my mind that it's so far away, yet we can still send/receive data.
 
MrGreencastle

MrGreencastle

Member
Pejo said:
So I'll admit, I'm not as up to date on space as I should be, but can someone please explain:

How the hell are we still controlling/communicating with this thing? Is it radio waves that travel ultra fast due to being in a vacuum or something? It blows my mind that it's so far away, yet we can still send/receive data.
Click to expand...

Radio waves are light, so they travel at the speed of light. It takes about 9 hours or so for a signal to go to New Horizons and back. Pretty crazy stuff.
 
SJRB

SJRB

Gold Member
This is so intense and at the same time I have yet to see any mainstream media report about this over here. Stupid Greece taking up all the time, I guess.

Next few days are going to be awesome.
 
K

KarmaCow

Member
Pejo said:
So I'll admit, I'm not as up to date on space as I should be, but can someone please explain:

How the hell are we still controlling/communicating with this thing? Is it radio waves that travel ultra fast due to being in a vacuum or something? It blows my mind that it's so far away, yet we can still send/receive data.
Click to expand...

We're not controlling it, by the sheer scale of the distances involved it's mostly automated. It takes 4.5 hours at the speed of light for anything to reach it from Earth and another 4.5 hours to get anything back. When the Mars probes were landing, there were similar issues with real time communication. That was in the order of minutes but still, it was impossible to manually control the probes as they landed so it meant there was a gap between anyone knew if they survived the process.

Also when people say things like the speed of light or c, it's a shorthand for the absolute fastest speed, only things with no mass can travel at that speed in a vacuum, like photons. It's a fundamental constant of the universe. Radio waves are not some discrete and unique entity compared to "light", it's just range of wavelengths that we have defined to be called that. It's still photons. Also, it's not like air is so dense to significantly impede a photon traveling through it. It will ping-pong around atoms as it gets absorbed and re-emitted but it still basically travels that fast in air.
 
S

sphinx

the piano man
what thrills me is how those planets are gas...

so there's no solid surface in them??

I wonder what keeps the substance or gas glued together, what's at its core that makes the gas stay put.

probably a stupid question but I'd like to know about it
 
M

Mango Positive

Member
sphinx said:
what thrills me is how those planets are gas...

so there's no solid surface in them??

I wonder what keeps the substance or gas glued together, what's at its core that makes the gas stay put.

probably a stupid question but I'd like to know about it
Click to expand...

The gas giants are so big and massive that the pressure makes the center basically solid.
 
L

Log4Girlz

Member
sphinx said:
what thrills me is how those planets are gas...

so there's no solid surface in them??

I wonder what keeps the substance or gas glued together, what's at its core that makes the gas stay put.

probably a stupid question but I'd like to know about it
Click to expand...

Jupiter has a rocky core larger than earth. You can think of it as a super-earth with an ENORMOUS atmosphere lol. Anyhoo, there's been tons of articles, but difficult for me to find. For now look at this awesome article about the age discrepancy of Saturn and how it relates to its core.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150626095705.htm
 
D

demon

I don't mean to alarm you but you have dogs on your face
sphinx said:
what thrills me is how those planets are gas...

so there's no solid surface in them??

I wonder what keeps the substance or gas glued together, what's at its core that makes the gas stay put.

probably a stupid question but I'd like to know about it
Click to expand...

gravity
 
G

GtwoK

Member
AmyS said:
Who remembers the Voyager 2 flyby of Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989?

26925w2.png
Click to expand...

Fuck.

What's amazing me about this Uranus picture is just the sheer scale of this thing. It's giving me vertigo just looking at this photo, which is a really weird thing to experience. I mean... It's literally just this giant bubble of gas, perfectly round and smooth, just suspended in space.

Seeing Earth from space in person would be incredible, but for some reason, seeing a gas giant like this is just on a whole other level to me. Just imagine flying closer to this thing slowly. Just this bubble floating there, on it's own, nothing holding it up. And eventually it gets so close that it envelopes you.

Insane.

Anyway, sorry to derail.
 
Insane Metal

Insane Metal

Member
sphinx said:
what thrills me is how those planets are gas...

so there's no solid surface in them??

I wonder what keeps the substance or gas glued together, what's at its core that makes the gas stay put.

probably a stupid question but I'd like to know about it
Click to expand...

There might be small rocky or even iron cores in those planets, we don't really know for sure. But they're huge and so they have a lot of mass (well, less than rocks or iron, but you get the idea) and mass = gravity, which is what keeps it all holding up together. Crazy stuff.
 
C

Concept17

Member
sphinx said:
what thrills me is how those planets are gas...

so there's no solid surface in them??

I wonder what keeps the substance or gas glued together, what's at its core that makes the gas stay put.

probably a stupid question but I'd like to know about it
Click to expand...

Both Jupiter and Saturn have a solid core. In fact, they are pretty certain Saturn's core is larger than Jupiter's.
 
I

ibyea

Banned
sphinx said:
what thrills me is how those planets are gas...

so there's no solid surface in them??

I wonder what keeps the substance or gas glued together, what's at its core that makes the gas stay put.

probably a stupid question but I'd like to know about it
Click to expand...

Yeah, there is no clear surface, the gas eventually transitions into some supercritical state in which gas and liquids are indistinguishable. For Jupiter and Saturn, metallic hydrogen dominates at some point while for Uranus and Neptune it is water/ammonia.
 
K

KarmaCow

Member
GtwoK said:
Fuck.

What's amazing me about this Uranus picture is just the sheer scale of this thing. It's giving me vertigo just looking at this photo, which is a really weird thing to experience. I mean... It's literally just this giant bubble of gas, perfectly round and smooth, just suspended in space.

Seeing Earth from space in person would be incredible, but for some reason, seeing a gas giant like this is just on a whole other level to me. Just imagine flying closer to this thing slowly. Just this bubble floating there, on it's own, nothing holding it up. And eventually it gets so close that it envelopes you.

Insane.

Anyway, sorry to derail.
Click to expand...

I know what you mean, I would have nightmares about Jupiter filling the sky when I was younger. It was oddly only Jupiter though, maybe it was thinking about how each of relatively small features was actually far more massive than the entire Earth but I still get kinda uneasy looking at it. The time lapse videos of Jupiter rotating are especially ominous.
 
G

GK86

Homeland Security Fail
A bit more info on what to expect:

Monday, July 13th

11:15pm: Last image sent from NH before it goes dark.

Tuesday, July 14th

7:30AM - 9:00AM ET: NASA TV coverage begins. Pluto and Charon images released.
7:49AM ET: New Horizons flies by Pluto at a distance of 7,800 miles away.
8:30PM - 9:10PM ET: NASA TV coverage of New Horizons' "phone home" from mission control.
8:53PM ET: New Horizons' scheduled data connection.
9:30PM - 10:00 PM ET: NASA TV coverage of a scheduled media briefing on the health and mission status of New Horizons.

Wednesday, July 15th

3:00PM - 4:00PM ET: NASA TV coverage of media briefing and high-resolution images of Pluto. An image of Nix, another one of Pluto's moons, will also be released.

Thursday, July 16th

12:24AM ET: New Pluto mosaic released.
3:24AM ET: Highest resolution mosaic image of Charon released.
9:23AM ET: Color image of Pluto and Charon orbiting each other released.

Friday, July 17th

12:33PM ET: Best-resolution photo of a fully lit Hydra, one of Pluto's moons.

Saturday, July 18th

6:30AM ET: Crescent photo of Pluto from its backside. Best color image of Nix, one of Pluto's moons.

Monday, July 20th

12:03PM ET: Final Pluto mosaic image downlinked until September.
 
S

sphinx

the piano man
thanks for the replies everyone

The Cowboy said:
If you were on Europa, Jupiter woud look around 24 times the size of our moon from Earth.
Click to expand...

I'd be scared as fuck, I guess I'd get used to it over time, but damn, so near... majora's mask nightmares every night
 
O

orientalNoodle

Banned
Any chance for the probe to point the camera toward earth and the sun and capture a picture with Pluto and its moons with earth as tiny blue dot?
 
The Cowboy

The Cowboy

Member
ibyea said:
On Io with an orbital radius of 421700 km and Jupiter radius of 69900 km, I calculated that it would be 19.1 degrees wide. The moon in contrast covers half a degree in the Earth's sky.
Click to expand...

That's like 36/37 times bigger than out moon from Earth i think - god that would be one hell of a view.
 
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