Some recent photos:
Global Mosaic of Pluto in True Color
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Pluto’s Breathtaking Farewell to New Horizons
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New Horizons Discovers Flowing Ices on Pluto
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New Horizons Captures Two of Pluto’s Smaller Moons
Jul 242015
Jul 222015
… with Microsoft Paint.
Jul 222015
This got lost in all the excitement over New Horizons/Pluto a week ago. But July 15 was the 50th anniversary of the Mariner 4 probe’s flyby of the planet Mars. Not only was this the first flyby of Mars, this was the *end* of “Mars.” prior to Mariner 4, people could at least imagine that the atmosphere, while thin, could support life, that there would be some amount of liquid water on Mars, perhaps even vegetation and canals. But Mariner 4 showed that Mars had an atmosphere not 1/4 as thick as Earth’s, but more like 1/150th as thick, that there was no possibility of liquid water (and little enough frozen water), and no vegetation or canals. More than a few science fiction authors of the day were a bit disappointed.
Jul 172015
Flying over Pluto…
And the best view we’re going to get of the moon Nix:
As an aside… I noticed when I went to add this image to the blog post that it was dated August, 2012. Almost certainly just a flub. But prepare for the conspiracy theories…
Jul 152015
The closest-pass images are starting to come in.
The tiny moon Hydra:
Charon:
And Pluto in closeup:
And this:
Views of Pluto Through the Years
Jul 142015
I have a number of ideas for different tales to go into Pax Orionis, including standard third person narratives, bits of memoirs, articles, interviews, technical descriptions, etc. Some of them I’ve started poking away at. Because why not, below are the opening paragraphs of four such yarns. Some I have little more than what’s here, others are good long chunks. None are done. The titles are just placeholders for the moment,
Jul 142015
Telemetry is coming in from New Horizons. Everything is nominal; seems Cthulhu didn’t eat it at closest approach.
Jul 142015
Jul 142015
New Horizons has gone past Pluto. Before closest approach, it radioed home one last photo; it then went into “can’t talk now, busy sciencing” mode for several hours, where the onboard computer went into full-time data gathering and recording mode. Won’t hear from it again until 8:34 PM eastern time, at which time a “ping” should be heard if the craft survived.
So, this *might* be the very last photo of Pluto… or it might be the last photo before the Really Good Photos start pouring in early tomorrow.
Jul 132015
Some might question why this mission to Pluto is so interesting to so many. I think I have it figured out: not only is this the first time humanity will have a good look at this entire planetary system… this is also the *last* new world of any magnitude most of us will probably live to see explored up close. Sure, there’s lesser known Eris, which is smaller than Pluto by a few kilometers, but substantially more massive… but last I’ve heard there are no real plans to send a craft there. And it’s something like twice as far from the sun as Pluto, so barring new propulsion systems, it will take twice as long to get there… call it 18 years. Couple that with the time required to actually design, build and launch the probe… New Horizons started design work in 1990, not launching until 2006. So if that process was duplicated starting today, “New Horizons Eris” would launch in 2031 and would flyby Eris in 2049. Assuming it didn’t get cancelled, the booster didn’t fail or the transmitter went wonky.
It’s safe to assume that most reading this here blog will be good and dead the next time a human craft explores anywhere *really* new that’s bigger than an asteroid.
So… this is it, this is the end.