Biretta tip to APOD, this comes from NASA:
NASA’s New Horizons – the fastest spacecraft ever created – will speed past Pluto on July 14, 2015, beaming back high resolution photos (and invaluable data) of the dwarf planet’s surface for the first time in human history.
Coat of Arms by D Burkart
on So very cool that it needs its own post! VOYAGER 1 is TALKING AGAIN!: “Thanks Father Z, cosmology lesson as only you can impart.”
on ROME 24/4– Day 35 (-6): adventures in symmetry: “Hmmm. Those kind of tassels have always reminded me of fancy curtain tiebacks so I have avoided making them but…”
on So very cool that it needs its own post! VOYAGER 1 is TALKING AGAIN!: “Fr.Z sez: …The Voyagers are destined—perhaps eternally—to wander the Milky Way and then become characters in Star Trek…. V’ger!! https://youtu.be/gxAaVqdz_Vk?t=96”
on So very cool that it needs its own post! VOYAGER 1 is TALKING AGAIN!: “Being from Florida, I remember when both Voyagers launched – you could see them from our house. At that time,…”
on So very cool that it needs its own post! VOYAGER 1 is TALKING AGAIN!: “Too bad the Curia has drifted too far from its power source…”
on So very cool that it needs its own post! VOYAGER 1 is TALKING AGAIN!: “Voyager 2 launched on 20 August 1977, from Cape Canaveral. Voyager 1 launched from Cape Canaveral on 5 September 1977.…”
on So very cool that it needs its own post! VOYAGER 1 is TALKING AGAIN!: “I guess Voyager I gives new meaning to the poem High Flight. Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of…”
on So very cool that it needs its own post! VOYAGER 1 is TALKING AGAIN!: “Now this is very interesting. Not just looking up at some small dots of light overhead!”
on ROME 24/4– Day 34 (-7): The burial place of… PLATO?!?: “The final resting place of Plato puts me in mind of a memorable excerpt I once read about Aristotle in…”
on ROME 24/4– Day 34 (-7): The burial place of… PLATO?!?: “Someone pointed out the St. George’s Day Google Doodle with its background account to me – with one of the…”
on Three items of interest: a conversion, a connection, and a con job: ““George Farmer, aka Candace Owen’s husband. He is a revert” If I’m reading the interview correctly, first a convert, then…”
on Three items of interest: a conversion, a connection, and a con job: “Not to detract from anything Imrahill said, but well, the papally-attested infallible ordinary magisterium about a catholic truth, not the…”
on So very cool that it needs its own post! VOYAGER 1 is TALKING AGAIN!: “Understatement of the year: they don’t make them like that anymore!” on So very cool that it needs its own post! VOYAGER 1 is TALKING AGAIN!: “What happened to Voyager 2? And what sort of “science” data will Voyager 1 soon be able to resume transmitting?…”
on So very cool that it needs its own post! VOYAGER 1 is TALKING AGAIN!: “Not too shabby for a 77’ model.”
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since Sat., 25 Nov. 2006:
luvit.
Wait, I thought they demoted Pluto from planet status in the last few years. Or is it a planet again?
It is a dwarf planet. It crosses Neptune’s orbit for a couple of decades every few hundred years, so it cannot be a planet, even though it fulfills all the other requirements, so they made a new catagory to cover Pluto, Ceres, and other planetoids that are not quite full planets.
The Brontosaurus “came back” as a dinosaur… so could Pluto as a planet. Most science requires more than a couple decades of trendyism to take root.
“Wait, I thought they demoted Pluto from planet status in the last few years. Or is it a planet again?”
Pluto’s classification as a planet or a dwarf planet is completely irrelevant to the New Horizon’s mission. Labeling is not science, but mere book-keeping. Pluto, for its part, shed no tears at the supposed “demotion.”
It’s is one of numerous large bodies in our solar system, and potentially representative of an entire category of objects we’ve never studied up close before. Therefore, it was worth studying.
Pluto is a member of the Plutoids (sounds like a soft rock band). As a Kuiper Belt object, it is one of many thousands of orbiting bodies – and not even the biggest one. It may be representative of other Kuiper Belt objects, so it is important to see it. Still, I sniff and tear up at having only eight planets. There was a time when it was thought that there was a hypothetical ninth planet that perturbed Neptune’s orbit and for a long time we thought it was Pluto, but more recent data shows that the perturbations in Neptune’s orbit were observational/data error, so there never was a need for Pluto. It got discovered for the wrong reasons. Still, it was a nice accident, because it would, eventually expose the Kuiper Belt and the Kuiper Cliff (where the Kuiper Belt objects, suddenly, fall of in number very rapidly).
The Chicken