New Horizons countdown.... only 4 more days to closest approach to Pluto.
I think this is big enough news scientifically to warrant it's own thread. On July 14th the probe will make it's closest approach, on the 15th we will have high resolution images of Pluto completing what was once considered the grand tour of the Solar System (all 9 planets at that time) even though we are considered a system of 8 with Pluto's demotion to micro-planet in 2006. Being a child of the 70's and 80's, dammit I still consider it to be at the ninth planet.
Anywhoo, figured it deserved it's own thread..... discuss.
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Landing a man made machine on a fast moving comet? Check.
Landing roving robots on Mars? Check.
Getting modern fly by images of planets in our solar system? Check. (Saturn, Jupiter and their moons and?) Check.
PLUTO! Whaaaaaat! Check (maybe).
Have we done any others? I want to say Mercury had a fly by but I might mistake that with the movie Sunshine.
Don't think we've done Neptune or Uranus yet. Why not those before Pluto? Wish it had more power after to send us some shots deeper into the Kuiper belt.
In 2149, a human science team exploring the edge of the system near Pluto discovered that Charon was not a moon at all, but an enormous piece of ancient technology known as a mass relay that had been used by the Protheans. The discovery was not completely surprising, however, since the Prothean ruins found on Mars in 2148 had mentioned such a device. While the scientific theory behind the creation of mass relays was still beyond humanity's reach at the time, scientists were able to reactivate the dormant relay.
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Pic taken July 7th from 5 million miles away shows a bright heart-shaped area is around 1,200 miles across and scientists are puzzled about what it might be.
Landing a man made machine on a fast moving comet? Check.
Landing roving robots on Mars? Check.
Getting modern fly by images of planets in our solar system? Check. (Saturn, Jupiter and their moons and?) Check.
PLUTO! Whaaaaaat! Check (maybe).
Have we done any others? I want to say Mercury had a fly by but I might mistake that with the movie Sunshine.
Don't think we've done Neptune or Uranus yet. Why not those before Pluto? Wish it had more power after to send us some shots deeper into the Kuiper belt.
Didn't realize there was a whole thread on this, but I'll leave it anyway.
This may be a dumb question, as I'm sure I'm misunderstanding how these things work, but why is it that Hubble can take photos of nebula's and galaxies millions of light years away, but we can't take a clear photo of Pluto from Earth?
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This may be a dumb question, as I'm sure I'm misunderstanding how these things work, but why is it that Hubble can take photos of nebula's and galaxies millions of light years away, but we can't take a clear photo of Pluto from Earth?
I was going to try and explain it, but this Reddit post articulates the answer much better than I ever could:
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Hubble can see things incredibly far away but only if they are incredible large. The Hubble's angular resolution is 0.1 arcseconds. Pluto's diameter is about 1200km and is about 4.2 billion km from Earth at its closest, giving it an angular diameter of about .06 arcseconds. For comparison the largest of the Pillars of Creation is about 7 light years long and about 7000 light years from Earth giving it an angular diameter of over 200 arc seconds. If you could see them and Pluto the Pillars would take up a much larger portion of the sky than Pluto, since they're bigger than they are far away (compared to Pluto).
Thanks Nyah. So it still seems to me that we could have built and launched a telescope built to see the solar system in high-res for less cost and time than it took to send these probes all over the place, unless there's another reason to get that close other than pictures. Can't we see what the planet is made of (element wise) from here?
Yeah, it's kinda simple, yet complicated at the same time lol.
The first thing people ask when I point my telescope at the moon is usually "Why can't you see the landing sites?" because they assume because I can see Jupiter and Saturn, you should be able to.... it would just make sense.
The easiest explanation would be this. It's all about scale, distance and size. You can't see a grain of sand that's 3 meters away, but you can see a hot air balloon that's 3 kilometres away.
In Pluto's case. The Hot air balloon (Jupiter) is 3 kms away, and Pluto would scale to Jupiter at about the size of a softball. Pluto is approximately 9 X further from the sun. So it would be like trying to take a detailed picture of a softball from 27 kms away.
Thanks Nyah. Can't we see what the planet is made of (element wise) from here?
We can get a lot of information from even ground based telescopes, Pluto is a really tough nugget though because of not only its distance but tiny size.
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So it still seems to me that we could have built and launched a telescope built to see the solar system in high-res for less cost and time than it took to send these probes all over the place, unless there's another reason to get that close other than pictures.
Do you mean a telescope that would fly around the solar system?
But most of our probes we send take a long time to plan, prepare and send out. We don't really send that many, between launches we gain new better technology, we often get new instruments and look for new things we didn't know to look for or thanks to previous missions we want to look at more specific things.
Really the simplest way to understand why we send probes is they are space science experiments. Pictures are just a tasty benefit we get, ultimately there is a lot on board these that seek to answer questions that scientists have about a region, planet, moon, etc..
Just take a look at all the cool stuff New Horizons has on board:
These objectives also go to help answer your question, this is typical of what probes do, something telescopes could never do for us.
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Pluto system encounter
Objectives
Primary objectives (required)
Characterize the global geology and morphology of Pluto and Charon
Map chemical compositions of Pluto and Charon surfaces
Characterize the neutral (non-ionized) atmosphere of Pluto and its escape rate
Loss of any of these objectives will constitute a partial failure of the mission.
Secondary objectives (expected)
Characterize the time variability of Pluto's surface and atmosphere
Image select Pluto and Charon areas in stereo
Map the terminators (day/night border) of Pluto and Charon with high resolution
Map the chemical compositions of select Pluto and Charon areas with high resolution
Characterize Pluto's ionosphere (upper layer of the atmosphere) and its interaction with the solar wind
Search for neutral species such as H2, hydrocarbons, HCN and other nitriles in the atmosphere
Search for any Charon atmosphere
Determine bolometric Bond albedos for Pluto and Charon
Map surface temperatures of Pluto and Charon
Map any additional surfaces of outermost moons: Nix, Hydra, Kerberos & Styx.
It is expected, but not demanded, that most of these objectives will be met.
Tertiary objectives (desired)
Characterize the energetic particle environment at Pluto and Charon
Refine bulk parameters (radii, masses) and orbits of Pluto and Charon
Search for additional moons and any rings
These objectives may be attempted, though they may be skipped in favor of the above objectives. An objective to measure any magnetic field of Pluto was dropped. A magnetometer instrument could not be implemented within a reasonable mass budget and schedule, and SWAP and PEPSSI could do an indirect job detecting some magnetic field around Pluto.
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Thanks Nyah. So it still seems to me that we could have built and launched a telescope built to see the solar system in high-res for less cost and time than it took to send these probes all over the place, unless there's another reason to get that close other than pictures. Can't we see what the planet is made of (element wise) from here?
The point of deep space probes goes way beyond simple pictures. They are studying the atmosphere, natural satellites, extreme surface details, magnetic fields, core composition.... the pictures are just a tiny part of the science. Also, the cost to build a telescope with the aperture to take highly detailed pictures of anything beyond Saturn, like we got of Uranus and Neptune from the Voyager probes, would likely exceed the cost of the probes immensely. You would be talking a series of mirrors that would takes probably a decade or decades to make, and the size would require multiple launches to get it into space. The James Webb telescopes mirrors took almost a decade to manufacture, and the program budget is around at 8 billion dollars at this point. And it still wouldn't give you a highly detailed picture of Pluto.
New Horizons comparatively, was a very, very affordable mission. And they basically sent up the bare minimum to get the job done. Even the reactor they used in it was a spare from the Cassini mission.
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Do you mean a telescope that would fly around the solar system?
Thanks for all the info!
No I more meant a telescope like Hubble that orbits Earth but has a shorter range to just see objects in the solar system. Or is that too wide of a range with vastly different sized objects at different distances for one scope to do?
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I though Hubble was taking images of objects around the solar system prior to having its optics repaired.
I guess one issue would be that planets are not *as* stationary as galaxies, nebulas, etc. that Hubble typically goes for. So, the tracking the target might be more difficult to get as good of images as the probes can.
New Horizons countdown.... only 4 more days to closest approach to Pluto.
