Pluto in colour

Just released colour image of Pluto...and you thought last week's image was incredible...

http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/crop_p_color2_enhanced_release_small.png

Pluto

Finally :-)  Not a lot to say about this one except this fantastic picture from NASA:

Pluto (C)2015 NASA

Has space exploration become boring?

At the expense of evoking Betteridge's Law of Headlines - obviously space exploration isn't boring - and with Voyager 1 maybe leaving the Solar System, I was wondering what happened to the romance of space exploration.

Does anyone anymore sit up until the early hours of the morning as I did when Giotto encountered Halley, being amazed at Uranus' bizarre collection of moons, fascinated with the existence of nitrogen geysers on Triton, volcanoes on Io; does anyone (other than scientists working at NASA, ESA, JAXA etc) get overly excited these days at pictures from Mercury, Vesta etc?

Does anyone dream of what the Ice Giants explorer might have found at Uranus, or what creatures might live under the icy crust of Europa's ocean?

I remember (pre internet days) desperately waiting for pictures of Neptune, Triton, Miranda, Titan etc to appear in newspapers, books, news broadcasts. Even back in 1992 the joy of connecting to NASA ftp servers to download Voyager and Pioneer pictures of Saturn and it enigmatic, orange cloud enveloped moon Titan on the only Sun workstation with a colour display the university had, over a slow internet link. Watching in fascination as line-by-line the picture was displayed and possibly imagining oneself at JPL watching those raw pictures being received at Earth.

The Register has an article from yesterday on Voyager 1 (yes, still going since its launch in 1977!) which has the paragraph (emphasis mine):

Probably the most-loved survivor of 1970s space optimism, Voyager, has sent back signals indicating that it's left the heliosphere.

Maybe this is it, in the 1970s we were optimistic - there were many missions planned: Pioneers 10 and 11, followed by Voyagers 1 and 2 to complete the Grand Tour of the Solar System; later with the first missions to comets, landers on Venus and Mars.

Maybe science just took center stage for a brief moment only to be replaced with the need for fame and appearing on X-Factor? Maybe a picture of the creme brulee surface of Titan from a small lander piggybacked on a probe that made a multi-billion mile tour via Venus, Earth, the Moon, an asteroid or two, Jupiter and finally to Saturn, just don't complete against today's media offerings?

How can you not be amazed by pictures like this - think about what you're looking at and what it took to get those pictures for a moment!

Wikimedia Commons, see: here

On the other hand a grainy picture of Titan from one of the Voyager probes offered mystery and a challenge to be solved - what is under those clouds? - now we get picture of sand grains on Mars. Have we accidentally removed the mystery? Or, have we lost the big exciting picture to a mass audience? A third possibility is that science is either not understood, or just can't complete with a crass, exploitative talent show...

Space exploration in any form is exciting...just listing some of the current probes:

• Dawn is on its way to Ceres after a successful encounter with Vesta.
• Messenger has completed mapping all of Mercury's surface and turned up just one or two (or freaking lots!) of major mysteries
• Cassini is still going strong around Saturn
• Juno on its way to Jupiter
• Venus Express still examining Earth's "twin"
• Numerous orbiters around Mars and not forgetting two (yes TWO!) working rovers on the surface
• Rosetta is still on its journey to 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko.
• China's moon probe made a detour to visit a near-Earth asteroid
• Hayabusa returning samples from an asteroid
• New Horizons still speeds to its all too rapid fly-by of Pluto and its now five moons (incidentally traveling at approx 15km per second or 34000mph)
• etc etc...
• oh, not forgetting Voyager 1 and the rest...

Now tell my what that isn't exciting? Maybe our media needs to reacquire its love affair with exploration and science and stop feeding minds with talentless shows...

Pluto's Fourth Moon

Not so long ago a fourth moon around Pluto was discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope and was given the temporary name of S/2011 P1 which contrasts slightly with the other 3: Charon, Nyx and Hydra.

The New Horizon's team announced on their twitter feed a request for suggestions for a name - along with a similarly themed article on New Scientist (400+ suggestions so far).

So, here's my suggestion: Apate - being the the daughter of Nyx (already used as a name for another moon of Pluto) and a suitable nasty character from Greek mythology to match the rest of the Plutonian gang.

I sent this as a tweet to the New Horizon's team as they asked :-)   You never know I could be following in the footsteps of Venetia Burney.

Aside: 3 posts in one day....I guess I'm taking up for not posting so much recently and working through a back-log of things I have meant to record for posterity....

Pioneers, Voyagers and New Horizons

Very nice diagram showing the positions of Pioneers 10 and 11, Voyagers 1 and 2 and New Horizons from AOPD (6 May 2011)

Pluto

Latest pictures of Pluto from Discovery News and National Geographic:

 

and not long to wait before New Horizons gets there too.