The Daily Interesting

[Daxed]

I tend to enjoy a geeky half hour in the mornings over the first coffee of the day.

In the hope that some may find something of interest, let's have some fun.

New Horizons launched back in 2006 atop an Atlas. Its a 10 year mission out to the Kuiper Belt for a fly by of Pluto and has just returned its first photo of Charon.

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/20130710....

[Eric Mc]

Genuinely interesting. I remember the discovery of Charon being announced back in 1978.

[MiseryStreak]

Hmmm...no mention of Nix, Hydra, Kerberos and Styx, nor the hypothesized 5 other satellites of Pluto-Charon, yet.

[Eric Mc]

Probably too far away to see these smaller moons yet.

It's still 500 million miles from Pluto - which is the same as the distance between Earth and Jupiter.

[Daxed]

As Eric said, still too far away, the returns will improve over the next couple of years.
I don’t remember the discovery of Charon, and am unsure as to why I don’t. I’m certainly old enough and it would have been of great import. Did it make the news at the time?
Following your comment I looked up the discovery and in all honesty don’t remember those pictures.

[Eric Mc]

I'm sure it got mentioned in the news at the time - probably just before the skateboarding duck.

There were a couple of telescopic discoveries made in the mid to late 70s, just before the deluge of new stuff that came in from Voyagers 1 and 2.

The other big solar system discovery made from ground observation were the rings of Uranus - probably the last great solar system discovery made by an earth based telescope.

[iacabu]

Saw this the other day...I'm glad they cirlced them in the next pic, would never have known what I was looking at

[MiseryStreak]

S/2004 N1 needs a name. I propose Phorcys. A Greek sea god of the dangers of the deep (all Neptune's satellites are named after Greek or Roman water deities). Fitting as this little 20km blighter shouldn't have survived in that hostile region.

[jmorgan]

Well, Messenger seems a tad overlooked.
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/
Will be taking this
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/news_room/details.php?...

Messenger web site said:

MESSENGER to Capture Images of Earth and Moon During Search for Satellites of Mercury
NASA's Mercury-orbiting MESSENGER spacecraft will capture images of Earth on July 19 and 20. The images will be taken at 7:49 a.m., 8:38 a.m. and 9:41 a.m. EDT on both days. Nearly half of the Earth, including all the Americas, Africa, and Europe, will be illuminated and facing MESSENGER, according to Hari Nair, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory planetary scientist who designed and is implementing the campaign. The images on the second day will also include pictures of the Moon, where all six of the Apollo landing sites will be illuminated, 44 years to the day after Apollo 11 landed on the Moon's rocky surface.

Seems Cassini is doing the same.

[jmorgan]

Cassini has now snapped Earth and the moon.
Clicky
Image from Cyclops web site.

Another

[Eric Mc]

Looks awfully small at 1 billion miles.

[jmorgan]

Not seen the Messenger one yet. Not sure when that one gets in.

[RealSquirrels]

that photo should be on the newspaper front pages, rather than a lot of writing and hardly any information about just-another-baby.

[Eric Mc]

Irrelevant comment.

[jmorgan]

Hey up. Messenger stuff is in.
clicky for piccy





From
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA17038

[Daxed]

So cool to see our home in this way.

Some info on the Cassini pic here http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimed...

[Hooli]

Those are amazing pics.