Tag: Pluto

  • But What About Pluto?

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    Brendan Barry
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    Damn you Neil deGrasse Tyson (but not really though)! Because, you know, he advocated for de-planet-fying Pluto back in the oughts. Which I mention because of this post from xkcd, which corrects common images of planets in the solar system accounting for their population. Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

  • What We Have Learned About Pluto

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    Brendan Barry
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    And of course a week with awesome science-y space news is not complete without a little bit of xkcd. Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

  • How We’re Talking to New Horizons

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    Brendan Barry
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    So New Horizons is long since gone from Pluto. But it will still take 16 months to send back all the photographs and science. Why so long? Because so far away. 3 billion miles away. Put another way, light from the sun takes eight minutes to reach Earth as it travels at, well, the speed…

  • New Horizon’s Flypast

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    Brendan Barry
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    A little after 07.30 EDT, New Horizons began its race past Pluto, what your author grew up learning as the ninth planet in the Solar System—the last planet to be explored. I recall thinking that when it launched back in 2006 I had no idea what I would be doing nine years later. Or at…

  • New Horizons

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    Brendan Barry
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    So this is generally a more serious post than usual for a Friday. Because, it is about New Horizons, the probe we launched almost a decade ago to explore Pluto, which at that point was still technically a planet. Anyway, the Washington Post has a nice illustration detailing the various sensors and orbits and trajectories.…

  • A Year on Pluto

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Last week, NASA’s Dawn probe entered orbit above Ceres, a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt. But later this summer, the New Horizons spacecraft is set to race past Pluto, formerly a planet but now a dwarf planet. New Horizons launched in 2006 and will have taken nine years to reach Pluto. But how long…