New Moon Found Orbiting Pluto

Dandan

Dandan

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New Pluto Moon Foreshadows More Surprises for NASA Probe En Route​

The discovery of a new moon around Pluto hints that a NASA spacecraft streaking toward the dwarf planet could uncover more surprises when it finally gets there.

The tiny new moon — announced today (July 20) and called P4 for now — brings the number of known Pluto satellites to four. And the find, made with the Hubble Space Telescope, suggests that NASA's New Horizons probe could make some big discoveries, too, when it makes a close flyby of Pluto in 2015, researchers said.

"The discovery of P4 just reinforces what we knew before: This is going to be completely new territory," said Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. "We can't wait."
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http://www.space.com/12372-pluto-fourth-moon-nasa-spacecraft.html

A long journey

The New Horizons spacecraft launched in January 2006 on a mission to study the faraway Pluto system, which has never been visited by a probe. That system is now known to harbor at least four moons: Charon, Nix, Hydra and P4.

When New Horizons' work at Pluto is done, scientists hope the spacecraft can investigate one or two other objects that — like Pluto — are in the Kuiper Belt, a ring of icy bodies orbiting far from the sun.

Since its launch, New Horizons has traveled more than 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion kilometers), and it's slated to make a close pass of Pluto in July 2015.

Scientists have been mapping out the mission's details for years. The discovery of P4 gives them something else to study, but it doesn't throw a big monkey wrench into their plans, researchers said.

"We obviously want to pay attention to it," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute, told SPACE.com. "But it's not going to reshape the basic concentration on Pluto and Charon, and also Nix and Hydra."

The newly discovered moon adds support to a theory that Pluto had a violent past. The system probably formed after a massive collision between two Pluto-size bodies about 4.6 billion years ago, Weaver said. The dwarf planet's satellites likely coalesced from the debris flung into space by this cosmic smash-up.

"The evidence is pointing toward that particular theory for the formation of the Pluto system," Weaver told SPACE.com.

More discoveries to come?

Scientists found P4 using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope during a search for possible rings around Pluto. (Hubble also detected Nix and Hydra back in 2005.) No rings have turned up, but that doesn't mean they don't exist, Weaver said.

The prospect of rings — and perhaps more undiscovered satellites — around Pluto is intriguing to mission planners. Yet it also induces a bit of anxiety, since the team wants New Horizons to emerge from its Pluto encounter without too much damage from fast-moving bits of dust and debris.

"This is motivating us to look even harder for more stuff in the Pluto system," Weaver said. "A lot of that is for safety reasons."

New Horizons was designed to unlock some of Pluto's long-held mysteries — what it looks like, what it's made of and the nature of its atmosphere, for example. The discovery of P4 may be raising scientists' expectations of what the probe will deliver.

"It just heightens the probability that we'll find something that we hadn't expected," Weaver said.
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really interesting. there is so much in our own back yard we don't even know about yet. I can't wait till I'm old and frail and we land men and women on some of these moons so far far away
 
A fake moon for a fake planet. **** off Pluto nobody wants you. Showing us your new moon after we've already shunned you just comes off as desperate.
 
So who's this dandan guy? Being away for a couple weeks is apparently way too long.
 
Someone who didn't post a "Hello" thread in the newbies section but seems alright.
 
lol @ pluto trying to recover it's reputation.

This is pretty cool though.
 
Krynn72 said:
A fake moon for a fake planet. **** off Pluto nobody wants you. Showing us your new moon after we've already shunned you just comes off as desperate.
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rPsOi.png
 
Sorry, his join date says "Jul 2011" and he has 14 posts...

Is this his second account or something?
 
Krynn72 said:
A fake moon for a fake planet. **** off Pluto nobody wants you. Showing us your new moon after we've already shunned you just comes off as desperate.
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Fuck you Krynn Pluto is the best planet.
 
Darkside55 said:
Fuck you Krynn Pluto is the best planet.
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**** no it isnt. Weak ass mother****a can't even control the objects in its own orbit. I mean shit, we even insulted it by calling it a dwarf, and the bitch just stays out there with no honor or pride, afraid of us. Pathetic.
 
Schall said:
...and the garbage day avatar.
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Ah, I didn't realize it was the same one. I knew Warped had a similar one, but all I could really remember was that it had vaguely the same colors, but I couldn't remember exactly what it was. Well, I guess that just goes to show how important an avatar is. I wonder how many of my posts would thought to have been by someone else since I changed my avatar.

Also, Warped is dumb for making a new account for such a stupid reason.
 
How do you lose a password

on topic: too little too late, pluto
 
NASA anticipates a probe will be passing that area in about twenty years, at which time they'll attempt to recover Warped's password.
 
A fiver says the probe gets there and it turns out Pluto was trolling the Hubble Telescope.
 
Bad^Hat said:
NASA anticipates a probe will be passing that area in about twenty years, at which time they'll attempt to recover Warped's password.
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I don't know what's going on in this thread, but New Horizons is on its way to Pluto and will be there four years from now. It's going kinda slow though in my opinion. It took some cool pictures of Jupiter on the way though. Also, after it does that, they're going to tweak the trajectory to make a pass on a Kuiper Belt object and be all up on that. It will sure be nice to have an actual image of Pluto and its tiny friends. The weird thing about the images of the new moon is that all of the other moons look brighter than Charon despite Charon being a lot larger than they are.
 
How'd you guys not know it was warped by the name DanDan?
 
StarBob said:
I don't know what's going on in this thread, but New Horizons is on its way to Pluto and will be there four years from now. It's going kinda slow though in my opinion. It took some cool pictures of Jupiter on the way though. Also, after it does that, they're going to tweak the trajectory to make a pass on a Kuiper Belt object and be all up on that. It will sure be nice to have an actual image of Pluto and its tiny friends. The weird thing about the images of the new moon is that all of the other moons look brighter than Charon despite Charon being a lot larger than they are.
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The probe is moving at a more pedestrian pace than usual because they're trying out a new system. They just asked Dan to bike out there and then make a pics thread.
 
I did lose my password because for some reason I didn't write it down and it was always on my other computer which is at my folks' house. Then I tried password retrieval and got no return email back. But yeah it'll probably be a long time before we see any pictures of our neighbor in the sky
 
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