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POPSAt 31,000 mph, Space Probe Gets Halfway to Pluto in Record Time; ETA: July 2015 Should make for good visuals... During that time, the probe will capture 4.5 gigabytes of data, which it will have to keep sending the four-and-a-half hours back home for months. With its main mission accomplished, the craft will keep moving away from the sun, following in the extrasolar footsteps of the earlier Pioneer and Voyager missions, drifting ever farther away from us.
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POPSWhy Pluto is No Longer a Planet Astronomers from the association were given the opportunity to vote on the definition of planets. In the end, astronomers voted for the controversial decision of demoting Pluto (and Eris) down to the newly created classification of "dwarf planet". For an object to be a planet, it needs to meet these three requirements defined by the IAU: * It needs to be in orbit around the Sun – Yes, so maybe Pluto is a planet. * It needs to have enough gravity to pull itself into a spherical shape – Pluto…check * It needs to have "cleared the neighborhood" of its orbit – Uh oh. Here's the rule breaker. According to this, Pluto is not a planet.
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POPSIs There Global Warming on Other Planets in the Solar System? Martian climate is primarily driven by dust and albedo and there is little empirical evidence that Mars is showing long term warming. Neptune's orbit is 164 years so current brightening is a seasonal response (Neptune's southern hemisphere is heading into summer). Triton's warming is due to the moon approaching an extreme southern summer, a season that occurs every few hundred years. Jupiter's storms are fueled by the planet's own internal heat (the sun's energy is 4% the level of solar energy at Earth). When several storms merge into one large storm (eg - Red Spot Jr), the planet loses its ability to mix heat, causing warming at the equator and cooling at the poles.
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POPSVenetia Phair dies at 90; as a girl, she named Pluto Her grandfather was Falconer Madan, the retired librarian of the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. He relayed the suggestion to his friend Herbert Hall Turner, professor of astronomy at Oxford, who on that day was at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society, where possible names for the planet were being discussed. Turner then passed on the suggestion to Clyde W. Tombaugh, who made the discovery at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona. When the name was publicly announced May 1, 1930, Phair said her grandfather rewarded her with a five-pound note. (The same purchasing power today would be about 230 pounds, or $350.) "This was unheard of then. As a grandfather, he liked to have an excuse for generosity," she told the BBC in 2006.
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POPS “climate change” throughout the entire solar system.
Here are some highlights: Sun: More activity since 1940 than in previous 1150 years, combined Mercury: Unexpected polar ice discovered, along with a surprisingly strong intrinsic magnetic field … for a supposedly “dead” planet Venus: 2500% increase in auroral brightness, and substantive global atmospheric changes in less than 30 years Earth: Substantial and obvious world-wide weather and geophysical changes Mars: “Global Warming,” huge storms, disappearance of polar icecaps Jupiter: Over 200% increase in brightness of surrounding plasma clouds Saturn: Major decrease in equatorial jet stream velocities in only ~20 years, accompanied by surprising surge of X-rays from equator Uranus: “Really big, big changes” in brightness, increased global cloud activity Neptune: 40% increase in atmospheric brightness Pluto: 300% increase in atmospheric pressure, even as Pluto recedes farther from the Sun This Report’s scientific data, from a variety of
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