• Members of the previous forum can retrieve their temporary password here, (login and check your PM).

We've Made It To Pluto!

Migrated topic.
Nathanial.Dread

Nathanial.Dread

Esteemed member
In less than 100,000 years, we went from small agricultural and hunter-gatherer tribes to being able to send a camera, traveling at 50,000 km/h, 5 billion kms to hit a moving target that's another planet that we first detected by measuring it's invisible influence on another planet.

Holy sh;t, we're cool.

Link

Wired said:
Here is New Horizon’s newest image of Pluto, sent from the planet yesterday and released early this morning. Each pixel represents 4 kilometers, and the image is 1000 times the resolution of anything from Hubble.

The image is oriented with Pluto’s north at the top. The dark regions (not shadowed) are the planet’s equator, which is about 2/3rds the diameter of Earth’s moon. The photo shows a lot of detail, but New Horizon’s scientists are cagey about what it all means. There are features indicating impacts, freeze/thaw surface activity and “maybe even tectonic activity indicating internal activity in the past, possibly the present,” says Alan Stern, New Horizons’ principal investigator.

And that’s only a sliver of the information to come. Stereographics will give measurable imagery of topographic relief. Compositional spectrography and plasma readings will show atmospheric activity. Thermal maps are coming. Full color photos.

And all of the above—and so much more—for the moons Charon, Hydra, Styx, Nix, and Kerberos. “By tomorrow, we’ll have images at 10 times the resolution of this image,” says Stern. We’ll be standing by, Alan.
Click to expand...

Blessings
~ND
 
Claim territory now!
:)
11144092_10153395767546772_2253785496907644245_o-1024x1024.png
 
Stellar! Or as Buzz Lightyear puts it, "To infinity and beyond!"

:d
 
“We’re going to do our 10-9-8 thing, and you can get your flags out,” S. Alan Stern, the principal investigator for NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto, told the people gathered here at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, which is operating the mission. “We’re going to go absolutely ape.”
Click to expand...
By Wednesday, the spacecraft will be mostly finished with the data-collecting phase of the mission and begin sending back the trove of information for scientists to delve into.

“It’s like opening up a birthday present every day from now until the end of the next year,” Bonnie Buratti
Click to expand...
Sounds exciting :want:
 
Pluto: 4 light hours away
Nearest star: 4 light years :shock:

Still have a ways to go...
But it's pretty awesome anyway :)
 
Its beautiful to see this planet like that but I think to my self : wouldn't it be better to first make order on our planet instead of spending so much money for useless discoveries while people are still dying from hunger and curable deceases here?

I don't know maybe its just me I have noticed that most of the people does not think this way. I just feel bad seeing all this wasted money for what a better picture ? How did going to the space ever helped humanity ? We just have to pay more tax right ? That is really good help :)

Please can someone explain to me or show me that I am totally wrong ? Maybe I just don't get it. Maybe its ok for all these people to die so we can see nice pictures.

Really for me this is like a big circus with clowns and stuff and we are those spectators blinded by all this charade not to see what is really going on here.
 
I think those two are not mutually exclusive.. On one hand I agree that we should focus on fixing our relationship with our own planet, before we start considering bringing our garbage elsewhere. And yet I also think that it is amazing that human achievement goes this far, that the human mind is capable of re-thinking and finding inventive solutions to problems, of advancing knowledge in ways we wouldnt have imagined possible years ago.

And sometimes these advances dont have a clear purpose, or dont seem immediately practical for the daily life of most people. But that doesnt remove their merit, I think just the fact we are trying to expand our horizons, break barriers, is already highly significant. It is an intrisic part of being human... we wouldnt have gotten this far if we didn't want to innovate and expand even if it doesnt seem usable at first.

Now if only we can do this without relying on unsustainable resources, conflict mineral technology, etc etc... But I think we're heading that way, or at least I hope so.

Brace yourselves, we might be just giving birth to something completely new :)
 
Back
Top Bottom