You dog!
It’s bad enough that I live in a beige subdivision, but now I find out the entire universe is beige??
To quote George Takei “oh myyyy”
Not only that but it will take a year or so for all the pictures to return. But that is due to low power.
15 hours and 15 minutes to the nearest approach. But, yeah, it’ll take time to process the data and start sending results back. Truly mind-boggling.
This feels like surfing nudie pix on dialup all over again.
Ended up not doing much there - the station sent me after the primary press conference at 10:30am. However it was nice to see the activities and I got a cool press package including a bumper sticker and pin.
A yellowish beige - I’ve got it on the dining room walls.
And if you’re having trouble waiting for Pluto pics, watching The Pitch Drop experiment probably isn’t for you.
That’s funny. I needed that. Thanks.
That’s probably the default.
That was just fucked up. We were waiting a decade for that thing, then they went to clean up the beaker and it broke off while they were fussing with it. Now we all have to live another dozen years for the excitement to build up again. Might as well plant an Amorphophallus Titanum and wait for that to bloom in the meantime. Or wait for Berkeley Breathed to start drawing cartoons again.
Discovered by a man named Clyde,
On that ship, he caught a ride,
It turned into quite a shot
Astronomer to Astronaut
Ah… I remember ASCII-art porn… the way it printed out one line at a time on the old teletype terminals. Sort of a like a strip-tease.
They’re probing Pluto?
Shouldn’t they be probing Uranus first?
Less than 6 hours to go!
Links:
Blog at Planetary Society:
Dr. Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy blog at Slate. He used to post here.
Space.com’s planetary page.
Spaceflight - News About Space Travel and Exploration
Closest approach is in 16 minutes! NASA TV is doing a live streaming thing to celebrate, and they’ll be using the moment of closest flyby as an excuse to release the best pictures from the last day or two. Today that should include some full-frame images of Pluto.
Of course, the actual probe is quite busy with observations, and won’t be sending any more data back until Thursday when it sends a small set of images from the closest approach.
About five minutes away from closest approach! There is already an incredible picture on Twitter taken yesterday at 476K miles away.
My understanding was that the first signals won’t start coming in until about 4:00 PM this afternoon, presumably because it will be VERY busy for about four more hours, consuming all its power and computing resources.
As a slightly more practical matter, New Horizon’s antenna and instruments are all fixed. They can’t be aimed independently, so there’s no communication with Earth while there are observations to be made.
Whoosh! and there it goes, right on by! I hope it didn’t blink.
This is so awesome and I can’t wait for the pictures.
What’s next for New Horizons?
It’s going to be very busy with observations for the next few days: taking as many pictures as possible before and after the approach. Its trajectory is also taking it through the shadows of both Pluto and Charon, allowing it to get some good observations of the atmosphere of each. Then, once the flyby and primary observations are complete, it’s going to sloooowly transmit all the data back, over the course of the next year.
Afterwards, there are plans to use the remaining fuel on the probe to fly by some other Kuiper belt objects sometime after 2018. Finally, it has some plasma instruments that will allow it to measure the solar wind at the edge of the solar system like Voyager 1 and 2.