NASA @NASA 2m2 minutes ago NEW: Pluto’s largest moon Charon has youthful terrain & dark area nicknamed 'Mordor' in north: http://go.nasa.gov/1CEz6EL
I love scientists. Lmao. I think it's so cool that years ago we were like "life can't survive anywhere. There's no water and it's too cold". Now,we're finding water ice everywhere and liquid seas and geological activity even in our neighborhood.
so how come Hubble can get great pics of galaxies light years away but we had to send a probe on a 9 year trip to get close up pics of Pluto?
Another thing is light emission. Galaxies you have millions of sun+ size objects emitting light. Pluto from here is only going to reflect back the sunlight that hits it. Think like the amount of glare you get from a guy reflecting a flashlight at a rock 20 feet away, or a high powered laser a mile away pointing it at you.
Pluto is super small and so far away that it barely catches any of the suns light, thus making it very difficult for Earth based or Earth orbiting telescopes to get a good image of it. It is hard as shit to try to find planets.
these both make the most sense to me. obviously pluto is incredibly small compared to galaxies, but i figured that would be somewhat offset by how much closer it is when compared to these galaxies that are 1000's of light years away. didn't think about the light.
Compared to what? Earth looking at different far away stars? More or less, you are correct. You could probably stare at the Sun if you were standing on Pluto. Pretty sure it would be obvious which star is the Sun but it would be significantly less "bright"
I watched a video that simulated it and basically it was only a little bigger than the North Star is to us. It was freaky to see.
http://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-annouces-plans-to-visit-europa-2015-2 http://www.space.com/28265-saturn-moon-titan-landing-anniversary.html
The James Webb telescope going into action is going to be an extremely exciting time. I can't even imagine some of the images that bad boy is going to send back.
I just don't get it. We spend billions on some pics. How does this help us? We find that some planet might have had life at one time. Ok, now what? All that money could've been better spent here on planet earth.
Well, they launched this today: Redmond, Washington – July 16, 2015 – Planetary Resources, Inc., the asteroid mining company, announced today that its Arkyd 3 Reflight (A3R) spacecraft deployed successfully from the International Space Station’s (ISS) Kibo airlock and has begun its 90-day mission. The demonstration vehicle will validate several core technologies including the avionics, control systems and software, which the company will incorporate into future spacecraft that will venture into the Solar System and prospect for resource-rich near-Earth asteroids. That's mining asteroids for precious and rare minerals or as asteroids call them: asteroids. That's trillions of monies.
Do you have any idea how much corollary technology has been developed in our attempt to search the cosmos?
Yeah I mean c'mon Obama. We could use NASA money for things way more important....like another Minnesota Vikings stadium! Shit why do we even spend money on science? We find out that gravity exists....now what? We find out that dinosaurs went extinct....now what? We find out that everything is made of atoms....now what? Even if I were to take your opinion seriously, humans have shown that we can spend $750mil (approx. the cost of New Horizons) in much, much more worthless ways than furthering science and space exploration. This is the internet so my opinion of different users isn't important, but you are an idiot.
If you're serious about this post, read the spin off technology page. It's absurd how many things have been developed by them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies
Seems to me like Gambler has no interest in bringing Astronaut Mark Watney home. That's a human life, you dickhole.
I understand it takes money to further technology, and I'm all for that. I think landing on Mars and on an asteroid was fucking awesome. What I'm saying is how are pics of a planet and knowing what it's made of going to improve our life?
I guess you or nobody you know has any use for Solar energy, MRIs, memory foam, powder lubricants or LEDs, just to name a few. Developing these 'pic's produces residual technologies with real world applications all the time.
I always thought Velcro was developed for use in space. I also believed the US pen/USSR pencil story. File this one under "Ya learn something new every day".
Exploration man, also we spend a billion dollars on many dumber things ie F-35 fighter. We barely knew anything about Pluto 2 weeks ago...now we know that there are mountainous regions there, indicating some sort of past or even current plate tectonics (which is a sign of an active molten core). Astronomers thought that due to Pluto's size and distance from the sun that plate movement would be very minimal if at all so this has them back to the drawing board as to the reason why. This is just one example based on the images that were snapped of pluto. There will be a shit ton more data that is coming in within the next few weeks, so stay tuned.
This new image of an area on Pluto's largest moon Charon has a captivating feature—a depression with a peak in the middle, shown here in the upper left corner of the inset. The image shows an area approximately 240 miles (390 kilometers) from top to bottom, including few visible craters. “The most intriguing feature is a large mountain sitting in a moat,” said Jeff Moore with NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California, who leads New Horizons’ Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team. “This is a feature that has geologists stunned and stumped.” This image gives a preview of what the surface of this large moon will look like in future close-ups from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. This image is heavily compressed; sharper versions are anticipated when the full-fidelity data from New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) are returned to Earth. The rectangle superimposed on the global view of Charon shows the approximate location of this close-up view. The image was taken at approximately 6:30 a.m. EDT (10:30 UTC) on July 14, 2015, about 1.5 hours before closest approach to Pluto, from a range of 49,000 miles (79,000 kilometers). Image Credit: NASA-JHUAPL-SwRI
Sacrificing the expansion of human knowledge for the pursuit of entertainment is a selfish act that harms the good of all humankind.
What improves our life is the lengths that we go in order to get those pics. We send a rover millions of miles away to take some pictures. We have to develop technology in order to communicate with it, to use our energy efficiently, to navigate it, to make sure it lasts under extreme conditions. Then that technology is used for more practical purposes on earth. Knowledge is something that we gain from those pictures as well. It tells us things that might happen in the future to our own solar system or planet. There are a million reasons why we invest so much money into it.
Looking waaaaay forward, all these lovely water ice moons with laughable escape velocities could make for handy logistical replenishment points throughout the system.
We just chucked a grand piano with a satellite dish on it at a planet we can barely see with the best equipment on earth. And had success. Holy fuck guys