What do you think Pluto looks like.

[LostElement]

What do you think? What features might it have? We are already aware that it contains a Nitrogen atmosphere. Guess we will find out next year?

[Accelerando]

I'd guess it looks something like Triton!

[Motokid600]

Ohh I cannot WAIT for July 2015. I was 15 years old when I watched the launch. Ill be 24 when we get the first pictures.

What are the chances of Pluto getting its planet status back after the pictures? I know WHY Pluto is no longer a planet, but just for novelties sake I think it'd be cool to call it that again.

And im kinda disapoited that its a fly-by. I can understand not inserting into Plutos orbit, but why not try and have the craft drift around the Kuiper belt instead? Because I hope we can get pictures of objects other then whats in the Pluto system.

[Tex]

I'm actually picturing a body much more akin to a comet than other space rocks or Jupiter-ean moons!

[astropapi1]

Here's a picture of Pluto, to give you an idea:

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Edited March 4, 2014 by astropapi1

[LostElement]

It's kinda weird that Pluto isn't considered a Planet. It does have like 3 or 4 moons. But its orbit is eccentric.

[Armchair Rocket Scientist]

Ohh I cannot WAIT for July 2015. I was 15 years old when I watched the launch. Ill be 24 when we get the first pictures.

What are the chances of Pluto getting its planet status back after the pictures? I know WHY Pluto is no longer a planet, but just for novelties sake I think it'd be cool to call it that again.

And im kinda disapoited that its a fly-by. I can understand not inserting into Plutos orbit, but why not try and have the craft drift around the Kuiper belt instead? Because I hope we can get pictures of objects other then whats in the Pluto system.

Well, if NH Hohmann transferred to Pluto, you'd be in your 60s by the time the pictures came back, assuming the probe was even still working. And then you'd need a lot of dV to get into Pluto orbit, and almost as much to get into an orbit within the Kuiper Belt. If you did enter a kuiper belt orbit, it could be another 50 years before you encountered another really interesting object.

New Horizons is pretty light by interplanetary probe standards, and launched on the heaviest Atlas V variant, so I don't think it would have been possible to get much more dV out of it. To perform a Pluto mission that didn't end in solar escape in a reasonable timeframe would be HARD. I don't know the exact dV requirements, but I would guess that with chemical propulsion only, you'd need a launcher on the scale of Saturn V or SLS to deliver a reasonable payload. With any other propulsion, you'd probably need a nuclear reactor, either for a NTR or to power some kind of electric engine. Either way, it would be an extremely ambitious mission for a very small target. With the same budget, you could probably put a submarine on Europa, a Curiosity-sized rover (or boat) on Titan, or a permanently flying airplane or balloon on Venus or Titan.

If I wanted to study a KBO in detail, I'd probably go for Triton. Neptune seems like a more interesting secondary target than Triton, and I think because of Neptunes greater mass you wouldn't need as large an orbital insertion.

[Dunbaratu]

It's kinda weird that Pluto isn't considered a Planet. It does have like 3 or 4 moons. But its orbit is eccentric.

The eccentricity isn't the reason. It's because it's not big enough to be forced into a spheriod and because it hasn't swept its orbit clear of other debris. The problem was that astronomers had been living under a fuzzy definition of the difference between a planet and an asteroid and when they decided to nail it down to something concrete they ran into difficulty trying to find a place to draw the dividing line that put Pluto on the "planet" side of that line while also keeping all the asteroids we know about on the "not planet" side of the line. There wasn't a definition of "planet" that kept Pluto as a planet without having to call asteroids planets as well.

So they had two choices - pick a definition that reduces the Solar System to only 8 planets, or pick one that increases it to 30-40 planets, most of them tiny. There wasn't a definition they could find that would have kept the count at 9.

[Jacob01]

It's because it's not big enough to be forced into a spheriod

It is big enough to pull its self into a spheroid. Even though they were quite blurry, the pictures from Hubble show that it is spherical.

[m4rt14n]

I'm more interested in the Charon "relay"

On a more serious note, why couldn't it aerobrake through the Pluto atmosphere and orbit it?

Edited March 4, 2014 by m4rt14n

[PakledHostage]

What do you think? What features might it have? We are already aware that it contains a Nitrogen atmosphere. Guess we will find out next year?

Like this?

Atmosphere? Maybe occasional elevated levels of CO₂, SO₂, methane and/or methyl mercaptans?

[Deadpangod3]

This is the best image we currently have of Pluto,

I'm thinking something like mars or similar, that or the black is water, the down dirt, and aliens are living on it.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0b/Pluto-map-hs-2010-06-a-faces.jpg

[Scotius]

Dirty snowball. And it's dark all the time there. And cold. But the sky should look awesome, with Charon hanging above your head.

[Accelerando]

Dirty snowball. And it's dark all the time there. And cold. But the sky should look awesome, with Charon hanging above your head.

It's not that dark.

The Earth orbits the Sun, on average, at a distance of about 150 million km. Pluto has a very elliptical orbit, but has an average distance of about 5.9 billion kilometers, or roughly 39 times the Earth’s distance from the Sun. Using the method above, the Sun must be 392 = about 1500 times fainter, or more grammatically correctly, 0.00065 times as bright. That’s pretty faint!

Or is it? Well, let’s compare that to how bright the full Moon looks from Earth. To us here at home, the Sun is about 400,000 times brighter than the full Moon, so even from distant, frigid Pluto, on average the Sun would look more than 250 times brighter than the full Moon does from Earth!

It would indeed look badass.

[Albert VDS]

It's kinda weird that Pluto isn't considered a Planet. It does have like 3 or 4 moons. But its orbit is eccentric.

There are many large asteroids that have moons.

[SSR Kermit]

If Pluto is a planet, then so is Ceres (between Mars and Jupiter), Eris, Sedna, Makemake and a whole class of Trans Neptunian Objects. It doesn't make much sense to extend the solar system out to thousands of AU and say that Sol has perhaps dozens of planets; should large periodic comets also be considered planets then?

[Klingon Admiral]

I'm more interested in the Charon "relay"

On a more serious note, why couldn't it aerobrake through the Pluto atmosphere and orbit it?

Because the atmosphere of Pluto is very, very thin and may or may not actually be frozen over when New Horizons arrives. And I wouldn't go aerocapturing with around 14 km/sec relative velocity.

Edited March 4, 2014 by Klingon Admiral

[Whirligig Girl]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/Triton_(moon).jpg

I'd guess it looks something like Triton!

I've always said that Triton is the closest a camera has been to a dwarf planet. But, keep in mind that it is in orbit around another body which may cause tidal forces, and is about as massive as the Moon.

I think it looks just like it does in Space Engine. Nevertheless, we will know soon.

[Whirligig Girl]

I found a fictional map of Pluto which looks a LOT like Triton, be it for better or for worst.

[kurja]

Well, there's this guy http://www.spacenow.com.br/pluto6.html

Need i even say that the astroimaging folks have shot down these images all over, they seem to really believe in it themselves though, to the point of trying to get some of their work published and peer-reviewed.

[Thiel]

I'm more interested in the Charon "relay"

On a more serious note, why couldn't it aerobrake through the Pluto atmosphere and orbit it?

Because we know bugger all about Pluto's atmosphere and geography.

[XIRA]

any info on the thickness of the atmosphere?? really looking forward to those first pictures we will get

[SSR Kermit]

At the height of Pluto's summer, the surface pressure reaches 0.30 Pa: less than 1/320000th of the surface pressure on the Earth. That fulfills the "least empty" classification of a laboratory vacuum (a "rough" vacuum).

It's more like an unusually large exosphere, stretching about halfway to Charon according to the current model. I guess New Horizons will tell for sure.

EDIT: Not that we really have so many examples of exospheres as to be able to say what is usual or not!

Edited March 5, 2014 by SSR Kermit
accuracy

[Winter Man]

I reckon it'll look something like that. Yeah, Pluto's pretty much Minmus.

Edited March 5, 2014 by Winter Man

[Whirligig Girl]

It's kinda weird that Pluto isn't considered a Planet. It does have like 3 or 4 moons. But its orbit is eccentric.

It's because it is much more like the other lot of bodies around it which are not like the other planets, and there are many many of them. look up the history of Ceres, or watch this video