Wow!
All I can say is, Wow!
Do you realize how infinitesimally small they would be from the Earth? Yikes! :eek:
Wow!
All I can say is, Wow!
Do you realize how infinitesimally small they would be from the Earth? Yikes! :eek:
New Horizons rocket damaged by Wilma.
I think that this announcement makes the New Horizons mission more important than ever. Who knows what else we’ll find out. (Though it would sucketh majorly if the probe smacked into an orbiting body around Pluto that we knew nothing about.)
I have to say, I’d laugh my ass off at that.
Yeah, then we’d know about it for sure. Imagine the press conference:
“Well, we lost another probe. But we ran it into something we didn’t know was there.”
So now we need two death themed names to go along with Pluto and Charon. Any suggestions?
If it was up to me I’d go Dracula and The Mummy ('tis the season), but then there’s a reason that these thing aren’t up to me. They’ll probably go for some hoity-toity greek mythological reference.
As long as Pluto gets to stay a planet, I’ll be happy. Maybe more moons will help.
Can we name one Cerberus?
There’s Thanatos and Hypnos (Death and Sleep). I don’t know if there’s a Roman version of their names.
Cerberus would be a perfect name for a moon of Pluto. Perhaps Percival might be a good name for the second. I know that Lowell was the inspiration for the naming but naming a moon afer him would make it more formal.
I think Cerberus and Persephone would be perfect.
I like Persephone. Cereberus seems a little off, since so far as I know all the moons/planets are named after huminoids, while Cereberus was more inhuman.
Of course there are now three moons, so we could name them Cerbrus head #1, head #2 and head #3. Be easier to remember, anyway
Eh. Iapetus was a centaur. Amalthea was a goat or cow (stories conflict).
Well, at least it would beat “Oops, we forgot to convert from feet to meters. Our bad”. I’ve long thought that if we’re gonna lose space probes it would at least be better to lose them to actual spatial phenomena, instead of stupid human errors or 50 cent electronic gizmos shorting out. IIRC there was some talk of routing one of the Pioneer probes through a “gap” in Saturn’s rings that the Voyagers showed was actually occupied by an undetected ring system. It would have been a rather sudden end to the mission, and not as cool as “our probe was apparently lost when it encountered a spatio-temporal anomaly of unknown type and origin–a tear, if you will, in the very fabric of reality”; but an honorable death for a space probe for all of that, like an intrepid caravel running aground on an uncharted reef.
Persephone would be good. But I’d go with Dante rather than Cerberus.
But Mickey, Goofy, and Donald are right out.
Well, they’re calling the “tenth planet” that was recently discovered Xena, so the whole mythological reference is pretty much out the window.
I think that the name Xenu would work.
Xena is the unofficial name, and it seems to be a bit of a joke. You can bet your bottom dollar that they’ll come up with something else soon.
As for Pluto’s new moons, I like Cerebus and Persephone.
Actually, change Charon’s name to Persephone (since she’s supposed to be Hades’s/Pluto’s wife), and name the two smaller moons Charon and Cerebus.
I think Xena is only a nickname at this point. The International Astronomical Association or whoever decides it will probably give it an obscure mythological name, like they did with Sedna.
Personally, I’m thinking we should name 'em Dante and Virgil.
Wow, simulpost.
When I clicked on this thread, I thought for sure **Tuckerfan ** would be the OPer. It seemed highly Tuckerish.
What about Dante and Randall? They certainly seem to think they’re in hell.
“Just because the orbit you doesn’t mean they like you.”