241–250 of 309 posts
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It's not like these copies replace the higher-res ones. Not a project scientist, but I'd rather as many people as possible see some image than only a few see only any at all.
The problem is when people zoom in and "see" things in the JPEG compression artifacts. Also when they release the pic on Twitter in crappy form before they release it in uncompressed form.
Quote from a friend of mine on the team: "After 9.5 years and 6 billion km, we made it to Pluto 72 seconds ahead of schedule." Amazing! The views of Pluto and Charon already reveal how incredibly fascinating this system is. The dichotomy of their surface colours will most definitely lead to further insight into formation processes in the Kuiper Belt. Just such a shame that we can't land this time around. With the vol…
Any actual engineer will probably find this comment painfully naive, but here we go: If it's infeasible to slow down to get into orbit or land on Pluto, what about the feasibility of designing a probe to impact Pluto at XX km/sec and survive well enough to send back data. Like, fire a (metaphorical) bullet full of scientific instruments directly into the surface of the planet. Is it simply that we have no way to buil…
That's actually harder to do.
To insert in orbit, you can still have some residual speed, you don't have to slow all the way down.
To land on the surface and survive, you would have to brake even harder. Anything near orbital speed would be a non-survivable impact, even for hardened electronics. Not to mention interactions with the atmosphere on the way down.
Does anyone know how they colour correct these images? I'm guessing there isn't a robotic arm holding up a test card in front of the camera :-)
Does it really matter? I remember reading about this in one of Richard Dawkins' book (I think its Unweaving the rainbow). Now you can complain about the Crab Nebula, whether its color correction, or you are lucky enough to view it up close with a naked eye. The colors you observe are just models of the different frequencies which our brain has evolved into to label as "red", "violet", or "#782". :) A much less/more e…
Check outworlder's post for the xkcd link, you petty graphic artists!
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> No, it is much much harder. Especially the survival part Please elaborate. What is dangerous about a braking burn? Sure, it's harder (because you need to carry that fuel), but not impossible in principle. > Sure, it adds a lot of complications as well, but it is a very good way of slowing your craft enough for other braking systems to work (like rockets, parachutes, etc) I'm sorry, when do rockets not work?
But it is not some fuel, it is more or less the same amount of fuel you need to accelerate the thing. And now you have to accelerate twice as much mass at liftoff requiring even more fuel. Of course requiring even more fuel itself. The tyranny of the rocket equation.
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Since you can see stars near the moon, you should be able to see stars near Pluto, which is less bright. More likely, there are no stars in the (very narrow) angle of the camera.
This is exactly the reason. Properly exposed with a camera, you cannot see stars near the moon. This is exactly the same effect. There are probably not any stars of high enough magnitude to be visible on the same exposure with such a bright object. In fact, there are definitely not: otherwise, we would see them on the image. For more proof, check out some earlier navigation images taken by New Horizons as it approach…
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But it is not some fuel, it is more or less the same amount of fuel you need to accelerate the thing. And now you have to accelerate twice as much mass at liftoff requiring even more fuel. Of course requiring even more fuel itself. The tyranny of the rocket equation.
Yes, it's hard. I understand that. But not impossible. Same arguments apply to Saturn, but "we" managed to get Cassini in orbit. It's a matter of scale, not principle.
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Not to shoot the messenger, but it annoys me when these things are viewed through the lens of artificial divisions such as nations. I understand that space exploration has been used as a tool to further many political machines, but it seems silly to me, especially when staring at a picture as beautiful as this from a distance that makes Earth seem so small, to think about the people living on this planet as anything…
Competition breeds innovation. Yes, we are one planet and one species, but our species is Human and we have an innate nature to compete!
Just want to point out the fallacy in your logic.
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Plus, probes that far out have worse-than-dialup transmission rates. It takes 42 minutes to return a single photo from the LORRI camera. Bursting large amounts of data out in a short period of time before impact isn't feasible. http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/0130080...
You would put something else in orbit and have high bandwidth communication to it and relay from there.
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Part of the reason New Horizons is going so fast is to reach Pluto in "only" ten years. A Hohmann transfer (which you would need to make a ballistic capture) would take about 124 years just to reach Pluto.
The article led me to believe you would avoid a Hohmann transfer with ballistic capture by flying it into a similar orbit and letting the planet slowly creep up on the probe and pull it into orbit. Am I misreading that?