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RE: New Images Of Pluto From 7,750 Miles
July 17, 2015 at 4:10 pm
(July 16, 2015 at 6:00 am)Chuck Wrote: Also, Pluto has an atmosphere. Pluto's Gravity is too weak to hold on to a primordial atmosphere over the life of solar system. So the presence of atmosphere might suggest Pluto remains volcanically active and continues to out gas from its interior.
Thats more or less what I was thinking.. Volcanic activity and/or perhaps tectonic plates reshifting and pushing up...
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RE: New Images Of Pluto From 7,750 Miles
July 17, 2015 at 5:10 pm
The insurmountable difficulty with these pictures (and don't get me wrong - they are mad cool) is that they were taken with 9 year old camera technology. So, if we had waited nine years for better cameras...I mean...wait...
Fuck.
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RE: New Images Of Pluto From 7,750 Miles
July 17, 2015 at 5:17 pm
I had been wistful (LOL) that the Voyager mission option to Pluto wasn't exercised, but the encounter might have been pretty disappointing. Granted, we had to wait ~25 years for New Horizons, but the best NH camera has 16 pixels (!!!) in every single pixel the Voyager cameras had. Much more sensitivity to light, also, so the ability to take more pictures at closest approach.
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RE: New Images Of Pluto From 7,750 Miles
July 18, 2015 at 5:14 am
The thing that amazes me about this whole thing is the fact that it is sending data back from 4.7 billion miles away using only a 12 watt transmitter! (just think of something with almost one tenth the power of a 100 watt light bulb... could you even see it from that distance?)
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RE: New Images Of Pluto From 7,750 Miles
July 18, 2015 at 10:04 am
Carl Sagan wrote about the MASER amplifier technology back in the 70s with an almost reverent and magical perspective. The technology really is amazing; exotic materials, cryogenic equipment, and years of tweaking and perfecting.
Bruce Murray wrote quite a bit about the struggle to get 117kbps from Mariner 10 at Mercury in the early 70s. That was a challenge for the technology and for the bureaucracy that had developed in parts of NASA. The department operating the downlink equipment wanted slow data rates to guaranty 100% perfect reception of every single bit, Murray realized a little 'noise' in imaging data was not that big a problem, so he wanted a very high data rate. He wanted the output of the camera electronics to go directly to the transmitter circuitry and not be buffered on the on board tape drive. The craft could take so many more pictures that way and it worked.
Just a few years later, the Voyager project achieved very nearly the same data rate from Jupiter, 5 times further away. Some really smart and careful work went into making long range data transmission work.
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RE: New Images Of Pluto From 7,750 Miles
July 18, 2015 at 11:46 am
(This post was last modified: July 18, 2015 at 11:57 am by Anomalocaris.)
(July 18, 2015 at 5:14 am)zebo-the-fat Wrote: The thing that amazes me about this whole thing is the fact that it is sending data back from 4.7 billion miles away using only a 12 watt transmitter! (just think of something with almost one tenth the power of a 100 watt light bulb... could you even see it from that distance?)
At least you have a big 3 meter highly directional antenna talking to a 70 meter highly directional antenna here, so it's not analogous to an omnidirectional light bulb.
Much more impressive was NASA's effort to listen in on possible transmissions from a lost polar lander, as I recall. The lander did not communicate with either orbital relay satellite or directly with ground. NASA thought the main high gain antenna directional might not have deployed on the lander.
But the lander had a back up 1 watt omnidirectional (!) antenna for communicating with relay satellite.
NASA clearly believed its ground stations on earth could pickup the broadcast from a 1 watt omnidirectional antenna on Mars!
That is like listening in on the signal from a cellphone handset from distance of Mars.
It would be interesting to calculate how many photons from that transmission would arrive each second on a square meter of receiving surface on earth.
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RE: New Images Of Pluto From 7,750 Miles
July 19, 2015 at 12:30 pm
(July 17, 2015 at 5:10 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: The insurmountable difficulty with these pictures (and don't get me wrong - they are mad cool) is that they were taken with 9 year old camera technology. So, if we had waited nine years for better cameras...I mean...wait...
Fuck.
Boru
But the camera technology we have today was likely designed 9 years ago. The Astrophysics community (and the military) usually gets it first.
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RE: New Images Of Pluto From 7,750 Miles
July 19, 2015 at 12:59 pm
(July 19, 2015 at 12:30 pm)orogenicman Wrote: (July 17, 2015 at 5:10 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: The insurmountable difficulty with these pictures (and don't get me wrong - they are mad cool) is that they were taken with 9 year old camera technology. So, if we had waited nine years for better cameras...I mean...wait...
Fuck.
Boru
But the camera technology we have today was likely designed 9 years ago. The Astrophysics community (and the military) usually gets it first.
Commerical camera sensors are much more price sensitive.
On the other hand, the sensors on the probe needs to withstand very harsh environment, constantly being bombarded by high energy particles.
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RE: New Images Of Pluto From 7,750 Miles
July 19, 2015 at 2:05 pm
Scraping up enough Pu was a headache. I don't think that shortage is any better now.
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RE: New Images Of Pluto From 7,750 Miles
July 20, 2015 at 2:36 am
(July 19, 2015 at 12:59 pm)Chuck Wrote: (July 19, 2015 at 12:30 pm)orogenicman Wrote: But the camera technology we have today was likely designed 9 years ago. The Astrophysics community (and the military) usually gets it first.
Commerical camera sensors are much more price sensitive.
On the other hand, the sensors on the probe needs to withstand very harsh environment, constantly being bombarded by high energy particles.
Yes, but the functional design of the sensor itself is essentially the same as what is on the market today.
'The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and seal. It could not be expressed better.'
-- Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens
"I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the scriptures, but with experiments, demonstrations, and observations".
- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
"In short, Meyer has shown that his first disastrous book was not a fluke: he is capable of going into any field in which he has no training or research experience and botching it just as badly as he did molecular biology. As I've written before, if you are a complete amateur and don't understand a subject, don't demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger effect by writing a book about it and proving your ignorance to everyone else! "
- Dr. Donald Prothero
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