Questions tagged [pluto]
Questions regarding exploration of the Pluto-Charon dwarf planetary system.
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If there's nothing special about Pluto, why was it discovered so early?
Pluto was recently re-classified, losing its official status as the ninth planet, because a bunch of other dwarf planets were found in its orbital region that were too numerous and insignificant to ...
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Why is it hard to take a high quality image of far away objects (like Pluto) using a high-tech space telescope?
Why did NASA send a probe so close to Pluto instead of using a high-tech telescope to capture images of its surface?
The Icy Mountains of Pluto. Image credit: New Horizons / Johns Hopkins Applied ...
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Requirements to orbit Pluto
I have seen this question posed often recently, without a satisfactory
answer in my opinion:
Why won’t New Horizons orbit Pluto?
The answers I read are always along this line:
too much fuel
too ...
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What is the fastest speed ever reached in space travel as measured from the point in space from which it was launched to its current/final position?
Answers.com lists the New Horizons to have the fastest rocket. Is this info still valid? 7 light hours in 11 years at 50,000 km/h?
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Why doesn't the New Horizons probe fly any nearer than 10,000 km from Pluto?
New Horizons is intended to pass within 10,000 km of Pluto on its flyby on July 14. This will give a maximum resolution on the surface of 50m per pixel. This seems to me a bit of a waste, when it ...
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Why didn't Pioneer 11 visit Uranus/Neptune, and why didn't Voyager 1 visit Pluto?
The following image from NASA shows the flight paths of Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 1, and Voyager 2, as well as the positions of the outer planets.
It seems to me that with a little tweaking of ...
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What's after Pluto for New Horizons?
I have read that the New Horizons probe plans on visiting some other Kuiper-belt objects once it passes Pluto, but not sure which ones. This brings up a few questions:
Are there any leading KBO ...
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Why have there been no new New Horizons images in the last few weeks?
As I write this, the latest image in the NASA's New Horizon's image gallery is this spectacular photo showing Pluto's atmosphere:
The full web page for the image is here.
That image was posted ...
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Operating system of New Horizons spacecraft
I've been doing some searching and I can find some technical details about the flight computer of the New Horizons spacecraft. What I've found is:
It has a Mongoose-V 32-bit CPU (a radiation hardened ...
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At what approximate distance will the New Horizons spacecraft resolve Pluto better than the Hubble Space Telescope?
As of July 2013, the New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) can resolve Pluto and Charon as separate objects. From what I've read, it will still be some time until the spacecraft is ...
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Would my weight be constant on Pluto?
Since Pluto and Charon have distinct orbits around their barycenter (located approximately 960 km above Pluto's surface), the centripedal acceleration must be different on the outer hemisphere of ...
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How much longer would New Horizons take to reach Pluto without the Jupiter slingshot?
A recent answer by PearsonArtPhoto claims:
New Horizons was launched at Solar System Escape Velocity, meaning it could have visited anywhere beyond Earth without stopping. It did visit Jupiter, ...
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What is a "Sailboat Island of Stability"?
The New Horizon's team, in response to an announcement of a press conference from the Hubble team, posted some speculations as to what the press conference might be about. On the list includes "Small ...
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New Horizons - How much time will we get to image the Pluto system?
When New Horizons arrives at Pluto next year, how much time will we get to image and explore (measurements, spectra-analysis) the Pluto system? Any ideas if we will see (or be able to count) Pluto's ...
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If we could send an orbiter to the Pluto-Charon system, could we put it in a stable orbit?
The barycenter of Pluto and Charon is in space between the two bodies, close to Pluto. It is the center point of the animation below. The image is roughly to scale. Note that the two bodies are ...
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Why do the pictures returned from the New Horizons flyby of Pluto lack motion blur?
When using a camera and and not being stable in respect to the target, picture smear occurs. Pluto is 2370 km wide and flyby occurred at speeds ~14 km/s and from distance of ~10,000 km.
To put in ...
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Why will there not be any images returned after July 20th until September?
I noticed in the New Horizon's release time schedule by Emily Lakdawalla/ Planetary Society that after July 20th, there won't be any data returns from New Horizons until September. Why is there a 2 ...
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Did New Horizons capture enough of Pluto's surface to create its global map?
Given the short amount of time that New Horizons focused on Pluto, did it capture enough of its surface to create a global map of it?
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How long have we known Pluto is red?
Recently the New Horizon's satellite has given us some lovely color images of Pluto.
When did we first discover that Pluto is red? Secondly, did we suspect its color was red before we were able to ...
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How are New Horizons images sent back to Earth?
I'd like to understand how does New Horizons space craft send its data back to Earth, billions miles away from it.
I read in a Time article:
"Also, at the distance of Pluto, we can only send data ...
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Why isn't Pluto a circle on LORRI images?
A Long Distance Look from LORRI images were published recently.
Pluto and Charon look like shrunken ovals here:
Why is this?
Is it due to Pluto and Charon's phases? Is the distance enough to ...
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How tall are Pluto's mountains? Are they the tallest ice features in the Solar System?
See also Just how steep are Pluto's tallest ice mountains?
The Gizmodo article It Looks Like Pluto Has a Liquid Water Ocean shows a large image of Pluto with obliquely lit peaks near both the ...
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What would happen if an Apollo astronaut landed on Pluto?
Pluto seems to be composed of Nitrogen and other ices that would be fluid or gaseous at higher temperatures. So what would happen if an astronaut using an Apollo era space-suit (crucially with that ...
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How "locked" are Pluto and Charon? How much does each librate as seen from the other?
Discussion below Are all or some geostationary satellites tidally locked to the Earth? got me thinking about Pluto and Charon. According to Wikipedia:
Charon and Pluto orbit each other every 6.387 ...
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How much faster (or slower) would it be for a new probe to reach Pluto?
New Horizions just reached Pluto after almost a decade in space. That means it was launched with technology that is well over a decade old (when you factor in planning and construction time).
If we ...
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Will Pluto's atmosphere collapse prior to New Horizon's visiting it?
It is thought that Pluto's atmosphere will freeze as it moves further from the Sun. We know that Pluto was it's closest to the Sun in the 1990's. Is it known if the atmosphere will freeze prior to New ...
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What causes Pluto's atmosphere to recede/collapse?
An answer to this question sparked my curiosity. Pluto's atmosphere seems to come and go depending on its orbital position and distance from the Sun.
If the heat up from coming closer to the Sun ...
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What is the relationship between New Horizons launch and Pluto's loss of Planet status?
According to NASA "New Horizons launched on Jan. 19, 2006" according to Wikipedia this is about the same time Pluto started on the path to loss of planet status. Is it just coincidence that both of ...
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Pluto's satellites other than Charon orbits around Pluto or center of gravity between Pluto and Charon?
As the center of gravity between Pluto and Charon is outside Pluto does Pluto's satellites other than Charon such as Nix, Hydra, Kerberos or Styx orbits around Pluto or the COG?
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Why were Nix, Cerberos and Styx discovered later than Charon?
Charon, a moon of Pluto, was discovered in 1978. Today we know that Pluto has three additional moons, but they were discovered 3 decades later? Also, Hubble Space Telescope was in operation since 1990 ...
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Compounds causing the various colors on Pluto's surface?
In the earlier, pre-New Horizons Pluto flyby question How long have we known Pluto is red? about the general, slightly reddish tinge of Pluto, the answer is "tholins".
Now that New Horizons ...
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Measuring the pressure and temperature of Pluto's atmosphere using stellar occultations
Is this primarily done analyzing the Voigt profiles absorption bands on background of stellar spectra or on re-emission bands of atmospheric compounds?
Assuming Pluto's atmosphere behaves like an ...
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Why does Pluto change color?
This article says
[Pluto] is about 20% redder than it used to be.
Have there been any further articles/Hypotheses on both the cause of the color, and more importantly, the color change? Or do we ...
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Use Pluto's gravitation to reach the next dwarf planet
Why doesn't New Horizons fly by nearer to Pluto so the gravitational pull would slingshot the probe to one of the next dwarf planets in the outer solar system (Eris, Haumea, Makemake,...)? I would ...
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Can New Horizons be turned into an orbiter for the Pluto system?
If the New Horizons team doesn't find a KBO target for the probe, can they turn it into an orbiter for the Pluto system? I know entering orbit right now would be impossible, but would it be possible ...
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Will New Horizons be able to tell if Pluto is from outside the Solar System?
Will the New Horizons space probe be able to discover whether Pluto is an extra solar body captured by our sun or not?
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Was there any launch vehicle possible that could have been used for a heavier New Horizons with enough fuel to enter Pluto orbit? (adding ~10 years)
Answers to the Astronomy SE question Can New Horizons probe turn back and start orbiting Pluto are of course no, it would have to have been a different mission with a lot more fuel and a bigger launch ...
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Why couldn't New Horizons try again to search for small moons of Pluto?
I was reading Alan Stern and David Grinspoon's Chasing New Horizons, the story of the quarter-century effort to prepare, enable, and run New Horizons' mission to Pluto. As many readers know, it ...
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Ice Mountains on Pluto
With the recent images from New Horizons, my question is simple. How do we know these mountains are water ice? The linked article doesn't have much detail on how water ice could make 10,000m+ ...
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Just how steep are Pluto's tallest ice mountains?
This answer to How tall are Pluto's mountains? Are they the tallest ice features in the Solar System? is worth a read and an upvote and says they are upwards of 3,500 meters and most likely water ice!
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When could we see Pluto's Southern hemisphere?
New Horizons just passed by Pluto, but was unable to see the southern hemisphere, as a result of it being in perpetual eclipse. When will the southern half be lit, so that the rest of the planet could ...
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Why didn't New Horizon use Mars as a gravity assist like it did Jupiter?
Part of New Horizon's path took it near Mars. Why didn't they use Mars for a gravity speed boost like they did Jupiter? I'm guessing it had to do with the relatively small size of Mars being unable to ...
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New Horizon's disabling safe mode near flyby (in 2007)
At the end of the Jupiter flyby, New Horizons entered safe mode. I remember at that time a question being asked "What would happen if this happened during the Pluto flyby", and the answer was that ...
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Why didn't New Horizons stay in Pluto's orbit? [duplicate]
As everyone knows, New Horizons, which was sent some decades ago, reached Pluto on July 14th, 2015 and it stayed there for only 24 hours and after that it is going into the Kuiper Belt and thereafter ...
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Do New Horizons Pluto flyby results justify an advanced orbiter mission to the Pluto-Charon system?
It's going to be another year before all of the data that New Horizons gathered is finally transmitted to Earth, but based on current science return, does what's been received so far warrant an ...
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Why is part of this New Horizon's Charon high resolution image missing?
The New Horizons team released the following photo of Charon today
This choice of image seems rather odd to me for a number of reasons. First of all, according to Emily's schedule, there were 3 ...
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When New Horizons is closest to Pluto, how fast will it be going (km/s)?
I've been googling this question because I haven't seen the answer anywhere, yet I know it must be calculated with a high degree of precision. Anyone know if it will be faster or slower than its 13.8 ...
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What is the meaning of: New Horizons' communication rate at 1kbit/s between the probe and Earth?
Is it a real-time communication rate measure? As in it would take one second to receive 1 kbit from Pluto?
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Is Hydra of Pluto cut unusually, or just darkened on its surface?
The image of Hydra recently released shows a sharply edged black half oval cutting deep into its bottom as in the image below. Is it dark sky behind an open gap we see, or just unreflective matter on ...
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Latitude and longitude lines for Pluto and Charon
I am hoping someone can point me to images of Pluto and Charon with latitude and longitude lines.
I know it's the convention to designate the near point of a tidelocked moon as 0°, 0°. Is the same ...
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