The AM Forum

http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/new-horizons-last-portrait-of-pluto-s-puzzling-spots

Ah... Pluto. We finally arrived to the end. Or is it the beginning?.

I once located and viewed Pluto through my 22" reflector.  It was not easy to find amongst the star field. I had to look for a "star" that was out of place from my charts.

What stunned me was how incredibly faint and far away it seemed. It is only about 14th magnitude in brightness.  This is within a few magnitudes of my viewing limit.

The surface features that the probe is seeing are no surprise to me.  Most of this stuff can be explained by internal volcanic, meteor impact or gravitational heating caused by its moon, etc. To expect a clean smooth surface of pure rock and ice would be fantasy.

It is an amazing accomplishment to send a nuclear-powered probe out 3 billion miles, continue to communicate with it and pass within 8,000 miles with 7 scientific studies running. Amazing. Humanity deserves a pat on the back considering that we first flew in a skin and bones airplane only 112 years ago. Oh, the places we will go over the next 1000 years!

T

Tom,  in the next 1000 years you're going to be too old to go anywhere,  except maybe 200 feet closer to Pluto at the top of your towers. ;D

Fred

 With in my life time we have either flown by or landed on all of the planets.

  One of my Ham friends work for NASA at Pasadena, he is into vintage equipment too, I'm transporting a Central Electronics 100 V he bought here in the Bay Area to Santa Barbara next month where he will pick it up.

   He told me that when he went to work for NASA over 30 years ago one of his jobs was to send a "how you doing today??" message to the voyager space probe each day.

  He would send the message first thing in the morning and have an answer the following morning.

  Sort of gives CQ DX a whole new meaning!!

Meanwhile, NASA can't launch a person into space. We've regressed to 1961.

Yes, but so has Russia. They're invading their neighbors in eastern Europe again. The more things change.... ::)

Of course, we're helping to finance it with the $71 million a pop price they charge us to send an American astronaut into space. It's a good thing we parked those shuttles when we did. One of them only had about 75% of its useful life left. In gov't terms, that's worn out and in need of replacement.

This Pluto thing.....I feel as though they're just using it to taunt the former planet. "Ha ha, you're not a planet anymore. Just came by to let you know!"

So it's not a planet with a moon. How does that work?

Yep, the human definition of a planet.  These parameters will keep changing as we explore the universe.  Surely there are infinite variations of planets and the line will keep getting redraw as we look around.

I find it interesting that if Jupiter was a little bigger, we would now have two suns instead of one.  The same goes for Neptune, Youranus and Saturn to a lesser degree.  It would have been rather strange to have four suns of varying intensity. This combination probably exists elsewhere in many variations.

And if the moon didn't get blasted from the Earth to act as a gravitational stabilizer, life may not have evolved as we know it.  It all seems kinda fishy to me.  Some intergalactic gang is pulling the strings out there.

T

It's all probably all a conspiracy to gain inner galactic control and definition.

Anyway, Walt Disney created Pluto many years ago.

But what about subspace?

It aint n-tuple space.


klc

Well, all those patterns and bumps heretofore unseen are there because Pluto's angry about being demoted.

Big Reveal Today, July 15 with all the canned and relayed pix collected over flyby at 3:00PM EDT on NASA TV.

Cute little worlds and aptly named.   The Altairian monitoring station on Charon will be finally imaged. If not it's because of a little noticed edit.  ;D

I've been watching the PBS Nova special on the Horizon Mission.  Those pix came to us from a 10 watt peanut whistle in space.  Talk about QRP DX!

A 70 meter receiving antenna helps to make it easier:
http://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/about/DSNComplexes/70meter/#

As does 400 billion watts EIRP going the other way.  ;D. (If the calculations are correct) from Similar discussion occurring for transmitters and receivers on both ends, with more specifics here:

http://www.eham.net/ehamforum/smf/index.php/topic,104248.0.html.

Friday, NASA TV's supposed to release more and detailed flyby pix and atmospheric spectroscopic data using sun across edge planet as light source for absorption spectra.

Prometheus?

Unbound.