Some of the first high-resolution images of Pluto

Ray Trace

Ray Trace

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http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/images/index.html

New Horizons finally flew by Pluto and we finally got some cool high resolution pics of that former planet and its moons for the first time ever since it got discovered in 1930. This is a huge milestone in science.

tn-p_lorri_fullframe_color.jpg


The heart-shaped plain, named Tombaugh Reggio, after the man who discovered Pluto, is like a love-letter to astronomers for seeing it, lol.

Here's what they learned from this
*The surface is younger than previously thought, where it was assumed it would have tons of impact craters.
*Pluto has gigantic ice mountains that defy what we thought about the dwarf planet before. It also possibly indicates that there's water ice on Pluto.
*Charon, Pluto's moon, was also thought to be littered with impact craters, but is actually far younger than that.
 
Well the planet icon in the Explores the Space game was tan, but yeah, it was colored blue.



Oh Magic School Bus, how wrong you are.
 
Yeah I know I was joking. If I was serious, I would have mentioned that Janet is completely wrong about Pluto being a planet. Regardless, I will never look at Pluto the same way again :P
 
We don't really count it as the "ninth" planet anymore, considering that Ceres, a circular object in the Asteroid Belt, is now considered a dwarf planet rather than an asteroid. Dwarf planets are still an entirely new classification though: planets have to clear the neighborhood around its orbit in which Pluto does not achieve in the slightest, whereas all other mainstream planets have.
 
I was going to write a whole thing about whether Pluto deserves to be referred to as a planet (at least colloquially) but that's been done a million times

so instead I'd like to point out how some temporary names for Pluto's landforms include Cthulhu and how awesome it would be to name features on the planet after Lovecraftian things, especially considering that Yuggoth was very likely based off of Pluto
 
Pluto was my favourite planet when I was a kid. I remember actually crying when I heard it wasn't a real planet anymore, and I was really young. I hope they make it a legit planet again.
 
Viper26 said:
Pluto's orbit crosses with Neptune's orbit, which is why Pluto is a dwarf planet
Click to expand...

Well its highly eccentric orbit is one of the reasons it's odd among other planets, but that's not a reason it became a dwarf planet. Our solar system is unique in regard that many of the orbits of the planets lie in a single plane. Many other star systems out there feature planets that move in highly eccentric orbits.
 
Pluto is looking beautiful, I really hope future missions focus on these ice mountains. The search for life always interests me.
 
Well, not before we land probes on Europa and Titan first ;)
 
Pluto is such a lovely site. And tbh, I didn't care that Pluto wasn't considered a "mainstream" Planet anymore; it still exists and still is Pluto, so it's not like anything really changed.

I just remember for the longest time wondering if there was ever going to be a point where Neptune and Pluto were going to crash into each other, but that was before I learned that the planets are not all on same plane and they will never collide, which kind of made me sad, since that would have been pretty cool.
 
^ *Rolls eyes* That pun.

Iirc, didn't a little girl suggest the name of the planet and it was voted along two other names? I know it goes well with the Roman Mythology names, though Minerva would have been cool.
 
Yep, a 10 year old girl suggested the name. I like Pluto though. An icy barren, dead world, similar to Hades.
 
Yeah, I read a newspaper article about that the other day. An 11-year-old girl heard about the new planet and suggested to her grandfather tha it should be named after Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld, to go with the rest of the planets, and he had connections and passed the name along and when they heard it, the discoverers were like "hell yes, that's perfect".

EDIT: post conflict nuuuu
 
Walkazo said:
Yeah, I read a newspaper article about that the other day. An 11-year-old girl heard about the new planet and suggested to her grandfather tha it should be named after Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld, to go with the rest of the planets, and he had connections and passed the name along and when they heard it, the discoverers were like "hell yes, that's perfect".

EDIT: post conflict nuuuu
Click to expand...

Sounds like you're making a pun there.
 
Lumastar said:
I'm glad this mission was successful and we now know much more about the planet. Now we need to start doing surface missions.
Click to expand...
I believe the farthest surface mission is Titan? I don't know the expenses and other tech and time involved with that, so I think it's going to be another long while until we get a surface mission on something like Pluto.
 
Well the budget is peanuts. Projects like the James Webb Telescope get delayed beyond belief due to the budget cuts. I'd highly be surprised if we will send a space probe in less than a decade flat.
 
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