Octopus Overlords

stessier wrote:The closest approach was under 8k miles.

New Horizons' almost 10-year, three-billion-mile journey to closest approach at Pluto took about one minute less than predicted when the craft was launched in January 2006. The spacecraft threaded the needle through a 36-by-57 mile (60 by 90 kilometers) window in space -- the equivalent of a commercial airliner arriving no more off target than the width of a tennis ball.

Because New Horizons is the fastest spacecraft ever launched - hurtling through the Pluto system at more than 30,000 mph, a collision with a particle as small as a grain of rice could incapacitate the spacecraft. Once it reestablishes contact Tuesday night, it will take 16 months for New Horizons to send its cache of data - 10 years' worth -- back to Earth.

stessier wrote:Ack - what has been seen cannot be unseen (SFW).

Spoiler:

After decades of increasingly confused arguing, Pluto is reclassified as a "dwarf Pluto."

DD* wrote:

stessier wrote:

DD* wrote:

More like as fast as we possibly could.

Kraken wrote:I totally understand why we couldn't have realtime coverage of the Pluto flyby -- time delay, low bandwidth, limited power. But as someone who sat up watching all of Voyager's flybys -- including the "Neptune All Night" coverage -- I'm a little disappointed. And the most exciting feature of Neptune's flyby was a cloud named Scooter.

Daehawk wrote:Heard a rumor Pluto is larger than they thought.

I love that pic of all the planets. Pluto should still be a planet.

stessier wrote:XKCD - what if New Horizons hit my car.

Spoiler: It would not be good.

raydude wrote:This just in! We discovered nitron!

AWS260 wrote:

AWS260 wrote:Charon.

stessier wrote:We ain't seen nothin' yet. Click to embiggen slightly.

Enough wrote:Cool article about the camera on board New Horizons.

Binktopia wrote:Also, I would have thought the Hubble Telescope could take better and sharper images of Pluto than that! I mean it can take amazing photos of galaxies light years away! Why can't it take really sharp photos of something relativity really close?

Galaxies are far away, it's true, but many of them are bigger than they are far, at least by comparison to the worlds within our solar system! Think about that for a moment -- how something that is millions of light-years away can still appear a thousand times bigger than something that's inside our own solar system.

Binktopia wrote:Also, I would have thought the Hubble Telescope could take better and sharper images of Pluto than that! I mean it can take amazing photos of galaxies light years away! Why can't it take really sharp photos of something relativity really close?

reddit wrote:Hubble can see things incredibly far away but only if they are incredible large. The Hubble's angular resolution is 0.1 arcseconds. Pluto's diameter is about 1200km and is about 4.2 billion km from Earth at its closest, giving it an angular diameter of about .06 arcseconds. For comparison the largest of the Pillars of Creation is about 7 light years long and about 7000 light years from Earth giving it an angular diameter of over 200 arc seconds. If you could see them and Pluto the Pillars would take up a much larger portion of the sky than Pluto, since they're bigger than they are far away (compared to Pluto).

Isgrimnur wrote:

reddit wrote:Hubble can see things incredibly far away but only if they are incredible large. The Hubble's angular resolution is 0.1 arcseconds. Pluto's diameter is about 1200km and is about 4.2 billion km from Earth at its closest, giving it an angular diameter of about .06 arcseconds. For comparison the largest of the Pillars of Creation is about 7 light years long and about 7000 light years from Earth giving it an angular diameter of over 200 arc seconds. If you could see them and Pluto the Pillars would take up a much larger portion of the sky than Pluto, since they're bigger than they are far away (compared to Pluto).