While the world waits for the aliens on the dwarf planet Ceres to stop playing games with us — bright spots (!?), 3-mile-high “pyramid-shaped mountain” (!?) — NASA’s spacecraft New Horizons has begun sending back photos of Pluto that are … well, mysterious.
They include, but may not be limited to, a heart-shaped bright area, a “dark feature” called The Whale and a series of four regularly spaced “mysterious dark spots.” All of which are in the following gallery:
The spacecraft will zoom past Pluto and moons on July 14, providing humans the first views of that dwarf planet’s surface. NASA is ramping up for the great fanfare that goes with such profound human technical achievements.
Team celebrates confirmation from mission control that we’re Pluto bound, #PlutoFlyBy sequence officially underway. http://pic.twitter.com/Se2Ls12maE
— NASA New Horizons (@NASANewHorizons) July 7, 2015
The agency’s media relations people are probably also preparing a lexicon of vaguely alien-suggestive names and analogies for what features New Horizons reveals … and it works. The agency got an ion-propulsion amount of milage out referring to big mountains on Ceres as “pyramid-shaped.” A reference we deconstructed in our story … “‘Pyramid-shaped mountain': How NASA broke the Internet with one phrase.”
And we love it. Why not.
The science of detailing geological forces, chemical analysis of what atmosphere there is and so on are important and interesting … but hard to wrap our non-rocket-scientist heads around. We live in a world where technical achievements vastly outpace our ability to understand them. So, we use metaphor and words like “mysterious” and “surprising” to capture the magic.
“We’re at the ‘man in the moon’ stage of viewing Pluto,” said John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado, deputy leader of the Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team. “It’s easy to imagine you’re seeing familiar shapes in this bizarre collection of light and dark features. However, it’s too early to know what these features really are.”
The man in the moon is made of cheese and spends his weekends in a pyramid-shaped mound on Ceres and visits Pluto’s dark spots for … well we’ll have to wait and see what New Horizons has to show us in a few days.
“The next time we see this part of Pluto (that heart-shaped region) at closest approach, a portion of this region will be imaged at about 500 times better resolution than we see today,” said Jeff Moore, Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team Leader of NASA’s Ames Research Center. “It will be incredible!”
Jake Ellison can be reached at 206-448-8334 or jakeellison@seattlepi.com. Follow Jake on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Jake_News. Also, swing by and *LIKE* his page on Facebook.
If Google Plus is your thing, check out our science coverage here.
from The Big Science Blog http://ift.tt/1Hbuu5b
While the world waits for the aliens on the dwarf planet Ceres to stop playing games with us — bright spots (!?), 3-mile-high “pyramid-shaped mountain” (!?) — NASA’s spacecraft New Horizons has begun sending back photos of Pluto that are … well, mysterious.
They include, but may not be limited to, a heart-shaped bright area, a “dark feature” called The Whale and a series of four regularly spaced “mysterious dark spots.” All of which are in the following gallery:
The spacecraft will zoom past Pluto and moons on July 14, providing humans the first views of that dwarf planet’s surface. NASA is ramping up for the great fanfare that goes with such profound human technical achievements.
Team celebrates confirmation from mission control that we’re Pluto bound, #PlutoFlyBy sequence officially underway. http://pic.twitter.com/Se2Ls12maE
— NASA New Horizons (@NASANewHorizons) July 7, 2015
The agency’s media relations people are probably also preparing a lexicon of vaguely alien-suggestive names and analogies for what features New Horizons reveals … and it works. The agency got an ion-propulsion amount of milage out referring to big mountains on Ceres as “pyramid-shaped.” A reference we deconstructed in our story … “‘Pyramid-shaped mountain': How NASA broke the Internet with one phrase.”
And we love it. Why not.
The science of detailing geological forces, chemical analysis of what atmosphere there is and so on are important and interesting … but hard to wrap our non-rocket-scientist heads around. We live in a world where technical achievements vastly outpace our ability to understand them. So, we use metaphor and words like “mysterious” and “surprising” to capture the magic.
“We’re at the ‘man in the moon’ stage of viewing Pluto,” said John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado, deputy leader of the Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team. “It’s easy to imagine you’re seeing familiar shapes in this bizarre collection of light and dark features. However, it’s too early to know what these features really are.”
The man in the moon is made of cheese and spends his weekends in a pyramid-shaped mound on Ceres and visits Pluto’s dark spots for … well we’ll have to wait and see what New Horizons has to show us in a few days.
“The next time we see this part of Pluto (that heart-shaped region) at closest approach, a portion of this region will be imaged at about 500 times better resolution than we see today,” said Jeff Moore, Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team Leader of NASA’s Ames Research Center. “It will be incredible!”
Jake Ellison can be reached at 206-448-8334 or jakeellison@seattlepi.com. Follow Jake on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Jake_News. Also, swing by and *LIKE* his page on Facebook.
If Google Plus is your thing, check out our science coverage here.
from The Big Science Blog http://ift.tt/1Hbuu5b
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