Actually, they're naming features after The Lord of the Rings, save Tombaugh Regio (for obvious regions). For one, the huge dark area is called Mordor.
They called the Whale "Cthulhu", so there you go.
edited 18th Jul '15 6:10:02 PM by AnotherGuy
Flowing ice? Atmospheric haze?
Let's fly over Pluto.
[[youtube:0AbiygSo478]]
edited 25th Jul '15 5:30:16 AM by AnotherGuy
Such amazing pictures. I feel a sense of triumph and a sense of sadness that human eyes will probably never see those worlds directly.
edited 25th Jul '15 4:54:44 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"^ "New Horizons probe to Pluto" would probably be better, since it did kinda have to get there first before it could be leaving.
Scientists Find Something Very Bizarre Behind Pluto
: "The path of New Horizons as it flew past Pluto on July 14 took it directly into the dwarf planet's shadow, and while this provided a fascinating opportunity to see its atmosphere lit up by the Sun, it also allowed the spacecraft to see the effects of solar wind on Pluto.
What New Horizons found is that the atmosphere is being stripped away by the solar wind, creating a huge region of cold and dense ionized gas that extends tens of thousands of miles beyond Pluto. This essentially creates a 'hole' or cavity in the surrounding solar wind, which was detected between 77,000 and 109,000 kilometers (48,000 and 68,000 miles) behind Pluto.
It is mostly composed of nitrogen ions, which form a plasma tail, although scientists aren’t yet sure what shape or size this tail is. It resembles the gaseous ion tails of comets, which extend far behind the icy rocks as they travel through the Solar System."
Hugging a Vanillite will give you frostbite.Pluto’s atmosphere could collapse imminently, New Horizons data suggest
IIRC, Pluto is in that part of it's orbit where it is currently moving away from the Sun. That means it's cooling off. This is probably part of it's cycle: every time it moves inward, it warms up and part of it's surface evaporates, creating the atmosphere. Every time it moves outward, it cools off and the atmosphere re-freezes to the surface. It's atmosphere may be less than 60-70 years old.
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.As mentioned earlier, there was a race to get New Horizons to Pluto before the atmosphere condensed and obscured all of the pretty landscape.
Informal names are all geek names
. Like "Cthulhu Regio", "Balrog Macula", "Vulcan Planum", "Kirk Crater", "Uhura Crater", "Sulu Crater", "Spock Crater", "Clarke Mons", "Kubrick Mons", "Luke Crater", "(Leia) Organa Crater", "Vader Crater", "Ripley Crater".
edited 9th Aug '15 5:39:15 AM by AnotherGuy
Ceres: 4 mile tall pyramid and lights
.
Guess with New Horizons approaching the aliens had to move to their summer place on Ceres.
That is strange. What could the source of Pluto's geologic activity be? It's small enough that it must have lost most of the heat of its formation by now, and far enough from the Sun that tidal forces would be negligible.
edited 12th Aug '15 9:26:49 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Assuming no further impacts,and disregarding the following weather effects,a week year or two is probably enough.
Edit:By total meltdown you mean something Earth vs Thea?
Though that's a random guess on my part.
edited 12th Aug '15 11:24:47 AM by alekos23
That's what I meant, yes.
Some crust goes bye-bye and everything else liquifies... and stabalises out in whatever shape works. That one.
Although, "Total Thaw: The Seasoning" sounds either like a great game, or somebody trying a little hard to come up with dinner party themes.
Yeah. That's what I've been saying. *confused* Seriously, two round balls so close to each other with weirdly-shaped bits orbiting around them isn't a hint that something probably Thera'd into proto-Pluto well after the system as we know it pretty much finalised its shape?
And, we have got a local bully in the vicinity who has a knack for messing with the neighbours... <points at Neptune> Setting collision courses over a billion years in the making? Could do.
edited 12th Aug '15 2:17:16 PM by Euodiachloris

There is no Pluto. It's all being faked by NASA. You can tell by the way the shadows fall in the photos.
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.