Search the Community
Showing results for tags 'pluto'.
Found 4 results
-
Found this to be a neat read February 4, 1906 – January 17, 1997. Today is the 110th birthday of American astronomer Clyde W. Tombaugh, who discovered the planet Pluto. Tombaugh grew up on a farm in Streator, Illinois. It’s said that, after his family’s crops were destroyed by a hailstorm, he gave up the possibility of attending college, but never gave up his dream of becoming an astronomer. By himself, he learned mathematical skills required for astronomy, including geometry and trigonometry. He later said: Can you imagine young people nowadays making a study of trigonometry for the fun of it? Well I did. More: http://earthsky.org/space/this-date-in-science-clyde-tombaugh-discoverer-of-pluto
-
Pluto’s moon Kerberos appears to be smaller than scientists expected and has a highly reflective surface, which suggests it’s coated with relatively clean water ice. This image of Kerberos was created by combining four individual Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) pictures taken on July 14, approximately seven hours before New Horizons’ closest approach to Pluto, at a range of 245,600 miles (396,100 kilometers) from Kerberos. The image was deconvolved to recover the highest possible spatial resolution and oversampled by a factor of eight to reduce pixilation effects. Kerberos appears to have a double-lobed shape, approximately 7.4 miles (12km) across in its long dimension and 2.8 miles (4.5km) in its shortest dimension. mages of Pluto’s tiny moon Kerberos taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft — and just sent back to Earth this week — complete the family portrait of Pluto’s moons. Kerberos appears to be smaller than scientists expected and has a highly reflective surface, counter to predictions prior to the Pluto flyby in July. “Once again, the Pluto system has surprised us,” said Hal Weaver from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. The new data, downlinked from the New Horizons spacecraft on October 20, show that Kerberos appears to have a double-lobed shape, with the larger lobe approximately 5 miles (8 kilometers) across and the smaller lobe approximately 3 miles (5km) across. Science team members speculate from its unusual shape that Kerberos could have been formed by the merger of two smaller objects. The reflectivity of Kerberos’ surface is similar to that of Pluto’s other small moons — approximately 50 percent — and strongly suggests Kerberos, like the others, is coated with relatively clean water ice. Before the New Horizons encounter with Pluto, researchers had used Hubble Space Telescope images to “weigh” Kerberos by measuring its gravitational influence on its neighboring moons. That influence was surprisingly strong, considering how faint Kerberos was. They theorized that Kerberos was relatively large and massive, appearing faint only because its surface was covered in dark material. But the small bright-surfaced Kerberos now revealed by these new images shows that that idea was incorrect, for reasons that are not yet understood. “Our predictions were nearly spot-on for the other small moons, but not for Kerberos,” said Mark Showalter from the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. The new results are expected to lead to a better understanding of Pluto’s fascinating satellite system. Source http://www.astronomy.com/
-
In a just-held briefing, NASA says that Pluto's "heart" will be named for the dwarf planet's original discoverer, a dark spot on moon Charon is called "Mordor," and Pluto is a relative newborn. This shot shows just one tiny sector of Pluto's surface in amazing detail. And there's much more to come. Tuesday, the New Horizons spacecraft thrilled us with the first high-quality shot the world had ever seen of Pluto. We were promised that there would soon be another image of even greater quality, and that's what NASA just delivered at a press conference at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. The image above shows an incredibly zoomed-in shot of the bottom portion of Pluto. According to NASA's science mission chief, John Grunsfeld, at this resolution it would be possible to see the JHAPL were it on the planet's surface. While there are no buildings on Pluto, thanks to the new image, the researchers were able to see that the planet does have icy mountains stretching as high as 11,000 feet. Perhaps even more significantly, because of the lack of impact craters in this area of the planet, the team is surmising that Pluto is relatively young -- probably less than 100 million years old. In addition to the new shot of Pluto, NASA also released this image of its moon Charon. The dark spot at the top of Pluto's moon Charon is being called "Mordor." Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman said that the shot "blew our socks off." She then went on to explain some of the features in the image. She said the dark spot at the top of the moon -- which the team is informally calling "Mordor," after the black volcanic plane in the "Lord of the Rings" tales -- is likely a thin veneer. In the southwest area, Bowman said, a series of troughs and cliffs are visible that extend for 600 miles across the moon, and at approximately the two o'clock spot on Charon's edge, a canyon plunging four to six miles deep is also visible. "There is so much science in this image alone," Bowman said, promising that an image that will have five times the resolution is coming soon. A slightly smaller bit of news is that the following image was also released, of Pluto's moon Hydra. It might not look like much to you or me, but it's pretty good considering New Horizons was 400,000 miles away when it was taken. Though it's not as captivating as the other shots being returned by New Horizons, it was enough for NASA researchers to pinpoint the moon's size, which they'd thought could have been anywhere between 20 to 100 miles across. Turns out that it's 28 x 19 miles, so "Hydra is not a planet," as Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist, joked. Source http://www.cnet.com/
