Comments on: Are we getting excited about Pluto yet?

By: SDG

SDG — Wed, 15 Jul 2015 20:03:19 +0000

This song by Jonathon Coulton has been in my brain for the last couple of days:

in case the embedding doesn’t work here is the URL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3cDdGKqp8E

By: hank

hank — Fri, 10 Jul 2015 21:13:34 +0000

Organics in solid solution in ice. Like Titan. Think methane, ammonia and water ices, with all sorts of hydrocarbons and other organic chemistry going on.

Brown’s about right. Then again, we may just be looking at highly enhanced reflected sunlight.

By: hank

hank — Fri, 10 Jul 2015 21:09:50 +0000

Even at the low orbital velocities out there, small objects will still fall onto surfaces at the escape velocity of the primary. Relatively massive objects like Pluto will still be covered with craters, much like our moon which is of similar mass…unless…there are other geologic processes that tend to fill them up–like glacial deformation. Indeed, these will be wonderful places.

By: Robert

Robert — Fri, 10 Jul 2015 17:08:58 +0000

I too was musing, thinking about how Pluto and the Kuiper Belt environment. To say it’s cold doesn’t begin to capture the potential alienness of the place. The cold and distribution of objects and materials. We’re more familiar with cold realms that experience occasional heating, leading to distribution and homogenization. But if it never warms up out there, will we see clumping of material, and organization into unfamiliar patterns like those orthogonal light patches? I don’t expect to see a “frozen sea”, which implies once-liquid; what will a world look like that’s always been cryogenic? And as for collisions, what are relative velocities like out there? You expect craters because you expect high-velocity impacts, but what if the Kuiper Belt is characterized by lots of slow grazing collisions?

So many questions. And I hope to get so many answers compressed into a couple of days next week.

By: podrock

podrock — Fri, 10 Jul 2015 04:54:26 +0000

The orthogonal light patches are interesting. Was musing the other day about Pluto and other Kuiper Belt objects: do they have a high collision rate? If so, given the many objects orbiting Pluto, might we see scars from recent (astronomically speaking) collisions? Which would look very different from the craters we are used to?

New Horizons indeed!

“Other skylines to hold us…” YES

By: Robert

Robert — Fri, 10 Jul 2015 03:20:51 +0000

By: podrock

podrock — Thu, 09 Jul 2015 02:58:16 +0000

Watching the fuzzy images getting sharper and sharper is what exploration is all about.

Amazing. We’ve extended our vision far to the edges of our solar system. An accomplishment we should be very proud of.

To evoke a phrase from the 70′s: “Far out!”