Did we really send a space probe to Pluto, coming within 0.5 Earth radii, then send it to a tiny object smaller than Rhode Island and come within 3000 miles? Cmon man!

posted 2 years ago by StormzAComing 2 years ago by StormzAComing +2 / -3

What's the truth on this interdasting subject? I find it hard to believe that we could get such accurate data from so far away. It's literally shooting a needle at the eye of a needle a million miles away and expecting it to go right through the eye. Look at the imagery! 30m per pixel at closest approach!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/486958_Arrokoth

And Arrokoth. Seems more like a buddy of Ashtaroth than an Indian word. I could be wrong.

But what does it matter? The whole missions smelled fishy once the Pluto information came back. High-quality pictures of Nix and Hydra, but barely any improvement of the other two tiny moons. And New Horizons didn't release a terrain map of the whole planet? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a3/PIA19947-NH-Pluto-Norgay-Hillary-Mountains-20150714.jpg/1280px-PIA19947-NH-Pluto-Norgay-Hillary-Mountains-20150714.jpg And this looks too fake. Mountains are cool and all but what is this? On a teeny tiny planet?

Or am I just too hyper?

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– pseudosapient 2 points 2 years ago +3 / -1

High-quality pictures of Nix and Hydra, but barely any improvement of the other two tiny moons.

Combination of trajectory and equipment. Look at the flyby trajectory. New Horizons didn't get as good a look at Kerberos or Styx as it did on Nix or Hydra. And the former are also a lot smaller.

Look at the resolutions:

New Horizons' best spatial resolution of the small satellites is 330 m per pixel (1,080 ft/px) at Nix, 780 m/px (2,560 ft/px) at Hydra, and approximately 1.8 km/px (1.1 mi/px) at Kerberos and Styx.

Nix is ~50km across. Or about 166 pixels.
Hydra is ~51km across. Or about 65 pixels.
Kerberos is ~19 km across. Or about 11 pixels.
Styx is ~16km across. Or about 9 pixels.

(For comparison, Ultima Thule is ~36km long! The only reason we call these 'moons' is that they appear to be in reasonably stable orbits around the Pluto system.)

Hence: decent-quality images of Nix and Hydra, and somewhat terrible ones of Kerberos and Styx.

And New Horizons didn't release a terrain map of the whole planet?

New Horizons didn't see the entire planet. Look at the flyby trajectory...

It's literally shooting a needle at the eye of a needle a million miles away and expecting it to go right through the eye.

Not really. There were a lot of trajectory adjustments to guide it there - and a lot of searching for a suitable object to go to.

Mountains are cool and all but what is this? On a teeny tiny planet?

Other way around. Gravity limits mountain formation.

And Arrokoth. Seems more like a buddy of Ashtaroth than an Indian word. I could be wrong.

Eh. People playing games with naming is absolutely plausible. And the original name was Ultima Thule...