New Horizons at Pluto

BenBurch said:
No way does it get warm enough for water ice to melt, though.
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Agreed. There could be something else that melts though. Maybe nitrogen. That melts and boils in the right temperature zone.

http://www.lenntech.com/periodic/elements/n.htm
Melting point -210 °C
Boiling point -195.8 °C
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Read more: http://www.lenntech.com/periodic/elements/n.htm#ixzz3g6FZmal9


Skeptic Ginger said:
Whoops, six days then.

From 2002: Global warming on Pluto
Though Pluto was closest to the Sun in 1989, a warming trend 13 years later does not surprise David Tholen, a University of Hawaii astronomer involved in the discovery. ...

Elliot said the Aug. 20 occultation was the first that allowed such a deep probing of the composition, pressure and the always-frigid temperature of Pluto's atmosphere, which ranges from -391 to -274 degrees Fahrenheit (-235 to -170 degrees Celsius).
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Doesn't sound like solar heating could significantly melt the surface.
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I think you will agree that not much effect is required.
 
rjh01 said:
Agreed. There could be something else that melts though. Maybe nitrogen. That melts and boils in the right temperature zone.
http://www.lenntech.com/periodic/elements/n.htm
Read more: http://www.lenntech.com/periodic/elements/n.htm#ixzz3g6FZmal9
I think you will agree that not much effect is required.
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I agree ice melts on Mars. But melting enough to resurface an icy body is still a stretch.

The same with methane ice, it would have to comprise a large surface area.

The Ice of Pluto is More Diverse Than We Realized
The entire world has methane ice, but it’s concentrated at the equator and relatively thin at the pole.
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Dinwar said:
Maybe the planets ricocheted off one another, and were captured in each other's gravity? I'm not up on my planetary collision physics, but I suspect that would be a poor explanation--anything slow enough to be captured would be a direct hit, not a glancing blow, and anything fast enough to be a glancing blow wouldn't allow for capture (or would completely liquify things).
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Ergo:
Southwind17 said:
I'd like to see a model/animation that shows moons, the likes of Charon, emanating from a collision. Anybody?
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I find the collision theory, whilst seemingly plausible, highly improbable.
 
According to the Free Dictionary if it's any kind of authority Charon is pronounced "kâr′ən":
Char·on (kâr′ən)
n. Greek Mythology
1. The ferryman who conveyed the dead to Hades over the river Styx.
2. Astronomy The largest of Pluto's three satellites.
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One wonders how it ever became translated to 'Ch'.
 
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davefoc said:
As others have noted carrying the rocket and the fuel to slow the space craft would have required a much larger space craft.

However, I don't think batman would use a rocket to slow the space craft. He would blast a self digging anchor into Pluto attached to a carbon fiber rope to cause the space craft to curve into an orbit around the planet. It's amazing that NASA didn't use this approach. If they had we could be getting pictures beamed back from Pluto for years to come.
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I've been thinking about this idea and have come to realize there is a problem with it. When Batman goes around a building using his hook and rope he keeps going just in a different direction. So the idea might not be as practical as I thought at first.

However, I think if Batman was faced with this problem he'd fire his self digging anchor into Pluto and then slowly apply the brake on the reel that the carbon fiber rope was being deployed out of until he had slowed enough that he could fire his maneuvering rockets to establish an orbit around Pluto.
 
davefoc said:
As others have noted carrying the rocket and the fuel to slow the space craft would have required a much larger space craft.

However, I don't think batman would use a rocket to slow the space craft. He would blast a self digging anchor into Pluto attached to a carbon fiber rope to cause the space craft to curve into an orbit around the planet. It's amazing that NASA didn't use this approach. If they had we could be getting pictures beamed back from Pluto for years to come.
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I feel like you'd run into the same rocket equation tyranny. As the spacecraft is being slowed by the line, the line is undergoing a force. The force the line can stand is related to the thickness of the line.

The stronger you make a line, the heavier it gets and thus the heavier the spacecraft, and you'll need stronger line. If you try stop the spacecraft less quickly, you'll need more line, which is heavier, and you'll need stronger line.

Anyone care to graph this?
 
RussDill said:
I feel like you'd run into the same rocket equation tyranny. As the spacecraft is being slowed by the line, the line is undergoing a force. The force the line can stand is related to the thickness of the line.

The stronger you make a line, the heavier it gets and thus the heavier the spacecraft, and you'll need stronger line. If you try stop the spacecraft less quickly, you'll need more line, which is heavier, and you'll need stronger line.

Anyone care to graph this?
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False argument. Nanotechnology is really light. Think spiderwebs. Damn back to Spiderman.
 
davefoc said:
I've been thinking about this idea and have come to realize there is a problem with it. When Batman goes around a building using his hook and rope he keeps going just in a different direction. So the idea might not be as practical as I thought at first.

However, I think if Batman was faced with this problem he'd fire his self digging anchor into Pluto and then slowly apply the brake on the reel that the carbon fiber rope was being deployed out of until he had slowed enough that he could fire his maneuvering rockets to establish an orbit around Pluto.
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Why not use the "slingshot effect" by tracing a path among Pluto and its various moons, until the craft had slowed down? Then enter Pluto's atmosphere for final braking, and land on the surface.
 
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Or we just find whatever planet the monoliths are hiding on and let them use their technomagic to turn us into Gods that can visit anything we want.
 
Travis said:
Or we just find whatever planet the monoliths are hiding on and let them use their technomagic to turn us into Gods that can visit anything we want.
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As long as we aren't travelling too fast when we approach the monolith planet, and whizz past it.
 
Craig B said:
Why not use the "slingshot effect" by tracing a path among Pluto and its various moons, until the craft had slowed down? Then enter Pluto's atmosphere for final braking, and land on the surface.
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My immediate answer is weak gravitational fields, though I'd need to crunch some numbers to be sure.
 
Craig B said:
Why not use the "slingshot effect" by tracing a path among Pluto and its various moons, until the craft had slowed down? Then enter Pluto's atmosphere for final braking, and land on the surface.
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catsmate said:
My immediate answer is weak gravitational fields, though I'd need to crunch some numbers to be sure.
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but don't forget the sumptuous dozen μ(micro)bar atmospheric pressure for aerobraking :)
 
catsmate said:
My immediate answer is weak gravitational fields, though I'd need to crunch some numbers to be sure.
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You don't need to crunch any numbers, just look two up and compare. Pluto's escape velocity is 1.2 km/s, and that's at the surface. New Horizon was flying by at a relative velocity of 13.8 km/s. There was never any possibility of gravitational capture.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Given that would make solar heating only secondary to internal heat sources it seems a stretch to then say solar heating resurfaced the ice.

Don't you think this exercise of attributing the resurfacing to solar heating to be getting just a bit silly, or perhaps anal?
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I think that all of this is fairly typical of what happens when something truly novel is presented to science: everyone scrambles to try to understand it, using the models we have. Those models will inevitably fail (see my gravity idea for one). HOW those models fail allows us to construct new ones, which also fail but in new ways. So I'm more willing to give it a pass, and explore all ideas. They're wrong, inevitably, but it'll be fun to see hwo they're wrong.

CelticRose said:
Why?
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My immediate thought is that it'd have to absorb all light it gets. Problem with this, though, is that evolution doesn't actually optimize things, it only makes things good enough. See the history of chlorophil on our own planet.
 
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