June 09, 2015

Space Stuff

One of the Brickmuppet's Crack Team of Science Babes brings us up to date on planetoid summer!



'Science Babe' by Moriyama Yuuki

With a probe in orbit around Ceres and another rapidly approaching Pluto, this summer promises to teach us a lot about Dwarf Planets (or planetoids, which just sounds better to those of us at Brickmuppet Blog).
First off, regarding Ceres, NASA has put together this retouched animation of the innermost Dwarf Planet.


I had NO idea hard vacuum sounded like that!

Ceres has the potential to be quite important in the future, since it is hypothesized to have more fresh water than the Earth. (This assumes that the two bright spots are not exhaust vents of course.)




MUCH farther afield. Pluto's system is going to be visited by New Horizons in July when that probe does a fairly precarious flyby.  In the process communications will be cut and hopefully resumed so it can beam the info back at 1 KBps. In the meantime thanks to Hubble, some neat things have been discovered about Pluto, which is actually a dual planetoid system  with its moon Charon.



The other moons in the system are really weird! They're elongated and rotate chaotically.  They're also vastly different colors. 

This video is an interesting  talk by DR. Mark Shoalwater on, amongst that and many other fascinating things, how his team discovered the "new" moons Styx and Kerberos.


Its an unusual story of bucking the bureaucracy, as his proposal was not just rejected, it was rejected with prejudice.  

Father afield still, in the vanishingly unlikely event this is not a mistake, it is significant!

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 06:43 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 273 words, total size 3 kb.

1 Obviously his wearing of a plain blue shirt is sexist and racist! Let's get some outrage going here, and force him to tearfully apologize!!!

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tue Jun 9 21:04:29 2015 (+rSRq)

2

And I think it's time to deploy the term "nanoaggression".

(By the way, I don't think your last link is correct.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tue Jun 9 21:07:02 2015 (+rSRq)

3 Erp! Thanks! (Fixed.)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tue Jun 9 21:42:10 2015 (ohzj1)

4 It's interesting that the largest white spot is smacko in the center of that crater. Is there any consensus yet as to what caused it or what it is?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wed Jun 10 00:32:07 2015 (+rSRq)

5 Exposed ice from a recent micro-impact?

Posted by: Mitch H. at Wed Jun 10 08:31:53 2015 (jwKxK)

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What colour is a green orange?




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