For all the awe that the Martian and Lunar photos instill in me, this is just the most amazing thing ever. For the entirety of my life up until recently, Pluto was this impossibly distant planet that we knew very little about. We didn't even hardly know what it really looked like. I think the most we had was the blurry Hubble shots.
And now? Now I'm looking up close and personal at this impossibly distant object and can make out land structures. Just wow.
The image above is from the same camera as the images released today. Taking great pictures is not about the camera but about getting in the right spot at the right time
I scaled it to fit 2560x1440 for my Apple Cinema Displays and used content-aware fill in the black space in the margins on the top and bottom. It works as an amazing wallpaper.
They appear to be parallel lines at an angle of about 12 degrees off horizontal. In a quick check it doesn't appear they are noticeably curved.
So in that case, a specific (small) region of the Fourier spectrum of that image should correspond to just those lines. So convert your image to Fourier space, locate the region (.. yeah, best to calculate where it should be, cause it won't really stand out enough to spot as the dashing is quite subtle), and then blur, or content-aware heal, or even just blacken the area. Convert back. Dashes gone.
Because this is the furthest away from Earth that we've managed to photograph in any real detail.
Because exploration. I really get depressed reading comments like yours, and I don't mean to have a go at you, I understand where you're coming from. It just upsets me that you can look at the product of an over ten year mission and dismiss it with such casual disdain, as if this isn't something that is literally at the limits of what we as a species can do. This is what we were meant to do, what we are programmed to do since birth - explore.
The reason it depresses me is because an overwhelming majority think like you - liek wtf is roks innit who cares. And this is why we spend so much time and effort on inwardly focussed nonsense and no time at all, given what we could do, on exploration and actual achievement.
So yeah. It is just rocks and ice. You are right. By so observing, however, you have missed the point so completely that you have made me sad for the entire human species. Well done.
While other have insisted on how that photo is a technology feast, taken from billions of miles away, from something we have never seen before, it's also breathtaking from what it shows: a multilayered atmosphere, completely unique in the Solar System; mountains of water ice next to vast plains of what may be ice nitrogen, also features never seen before on any other body of the Solar System. Before July, many people thought that maybe we would see just another round rock full of craters, ala Mercury, nobody expected what we see now. How many times in your adult life a photo has shown you something that you could never have imagined before?
On top of that, the backlit quality of the photo makes the relief jump at you in a staggering way. It's not like the pictures taken from above, where you can see the same features from very high, in a detached way. Here the landscape just feel real, like if you were there looking at it. Also it gives a sense of the size of the mountains, especially compared to the curvature of the horizon.
Weirdly, the light is what surprises me the most. I always thought the surface of Pluto was cloaked in eternal night because the sun is so far away. Turns out high noon on Pluto is more or less as bright as twilight on Earth!
Usually photos are evaluated not only for the reality that they've captured, but also how hard it was to take that photo.
In the case of Pluto's high-resolution photos, there are maybe billion dollars behind it and hundreds of people that worked for years before actually the photo has been taken.
According to this page [0], which links to a broken link on NASA's site as source, it was "only" $720 million, not billions.
I only mention it to underscore that our intuition on the cost of NASA is often wrong. You see a lot of people complaining about the relevance of spending on NASA, when they actually represent a very small part of the overall budget and they spend the money very well.
In contrast, Facebook bought Oculus for $2 billion, tried to buy Snapchat for $3 billion, Microsoft bought Mojang for $2.5 billion. Maybe it's a sign we aren't taxing them enough, if apparently there is enough money to go around for toys but not NASA.
For $720 million, they built a half-ton spacecraft, launched it into space, sent it on a path out of the solar system, tracked and guided it all the way, and had it gather about a million times more data than existed before about a particular small icy body billions of miles away.
To put it into perspective, that's about what it would cost to buy two A380 airliners. Two. You can buy two airliners that are not much different from the ones that existed 40 years ago, but that happen to be somewhat larger and carry some more people, and then have to spend even more money to operate them, or for the same money NASA can do an entire mission to Pluto from start to finish.
Or for a different perspective, for the cost of the B-2 program (an airplane which basically never had a mission, whose key feature probably doesn't work anymore, and which in any case is far too expensive and precious to risk in any environment where there's the slightest chance it could be shot down), assuming costs would be the same as Pluto, NASA could send seven missions each to every planet in the Solar System including Pluto.
For yet another perspective, it's about 1/9th the cost of the Washington Metro's Silver Line product. So, one mission each to every planet in the Solar system including Pluto, or 60 miles of railroad track and 11 light-rail stations.
It's not a sign that people aren't being taxed enough, it's a sign that NASA is a bastion of amazing efficiency and capability in a sea of unbelievable waste.
The solution is not to tax "toys" as you call them, there are already plenty of existing tax dollars to go around. The larger issue is that we would rather buy 1700 F35 fighters instead of funding NASA for the next 10 years. Actually even the F35 is a slightly more reasonable use of money then some of the other things that make it onto the budget. The money is there in many cases but the will to use it for NASA is not since to many NASA is considered a toy.
Yeah, if we just stopped burning dollars by the cargoship load on a "war" with no defined goals, then we could probably afford to do whatever the hell we wanted on every other project going on in the country.
No, the labor, application of skill, and physical resources that the money represents literally gets blown up. We have bridges falling down, not enough roads, the highest healthcare costs in the developed world, and we're spending money on bombs.
Indeed, my point was that arguing that the pluto mission cost "only" $720 million and thus comparing the value of the products of this mission as less than the acquisitions of Oculus at $2B and Mojang at $2.5B does a great disservice to this achievement.
No, that's not what I was doing. I wasn't saying price = value. I was specifically trying to say the opposite, that such an obviously valuable project had come at an incredibly cheap price, comparatively.
Fair enough. Honestly I also think the comparison demonstrates how over valued those acquisitions were (in terms of what they bring to the human race).
It's hard to agree on that, because I'm not a US citizen. Anyway what NASA / EU space programs are doing is far more significant for humanity ( IMHO ) than what Facebook Oculus and Snapchat are trying to achieve, so it looks really unfair.
On the other hand, I do sort of believe that the work that Oculus and other VR companies are doing is going to help the first manned mission to Mars keep from going insane.
Oh man, I would love to try VR in zero-G. I wonder if the visual ground reference would take over for the lack of vestibular ground reference? ZOMG! There is science to be done!
They create demand, which means people work to purchase them.
That work brings value to society (person x helped build a bridge, y did a dental implant, z built a yacht (horrors, a toy for a rich person, but recursively read this post)).
This is how economics works. You can't artificially split out some random activity, decide it is 'frivolous', and tax it out of existence. We are creating things, not destroying things. Dollars spent do not disappear, they are leveraged and multiplied via the labor of millions as they pass through our hands in an elaborate dance of IOUs. A dollar bill is a chit - a promise of later labor.
"Dollars spent do not disappear" is true but meaningless. What counts is the wealth people create, and the opportunity cost of what you do.
For an extreme example, imagine that every day I hire somebody to move my wood pile to the other side of the house. After two days I'm back where I started, but I've wasted a person's labor for two days. The dollars I paid them didn't disappear, but we've lost whatever useful activity they might have done during that time.
Not all work brings value to society. Just because someone is given money to do something doesn't make that something useful. On the other hand, just because something isn't of value to society doesn't mean it should be prohibited or taxed out of existence. And determining whether something is useful to society is really tough, so we shouldn't assume we can figure it out. But saying they "create thousands of jobs" and "dollars spent do not disappear" isn't a good argument for these things.
Ponzi schemes for example are illegal. Gambling creates no net value so it is tightly regulated. Cigarettes are a net drag on society so they are highly taxed.
It's the first-of-a-kind photo from a probe which flew across most of the solar system and skimmed the target at a range of 7,750 miles while travelling at nearly 31,000 mph.
And sent back images using about the same ambient light as a slightly cloudy evening on Earth.
With no motion blur.
That's not just exciting - it's an amazing feat of engineering.
It is a photo, taken from a camera that we shot out of our atmosphere -- defeating gravity -- got to the depth of our solar system, with the sole purpose of photographing an icy rock.
A little over a century ago, this object was a hypothesis. The existence of this vivid image provides a peek into the vastness and variety of space, a humbling perspective on what dedicated people are capable of, and more broadly a clarion endorsement of the scientific method itself. Please pay attention.
Except, it's in a temperature regime so alien to us that your assumptions on seeing those 'rocks and ice' are very wrong. The 'rocks' are water ice. The 'ice' is frozen nitrogen. Nobody thought Pluto would have a dynamic weather system - a climate. And yet it seems to have a glacial nitrogen precipitation cycle. The geological forms look familiar. The mechanisms are not. That's pretty incredible.
While it doesn't take away from the magnitude of sending a grand piano-sized suite of instruments and cameras to Pluto, both the planetoid and the NH probe are actually closer to 5 billion km away[0][1].
Pluto does indeed have an aphelion at some 7,311,000,000km (~48 AU), but its eccentric orbit means that its perihelion is about 20 AU closer to the Sun than its aphelion.
For a visual of how far away Pluto really is from Earth(and really how far away everything in our solar system is from eachother) I recommend checking out Riding Light https://vimeo.com/117815404
"This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of light emitted from the surface of the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system, from a human perspective."
The video is 45 minutes long and makes it just past Jupiter. It would have to be 5.5 hours long to show Pluto.
Man, how silly does it sound that I'm struggling to travel 40 kilometres twice a week when I passed the 1 billion kilometres mark here and still haven't reached Saturn.
If the start line of the marathon happens at the center of the Sun, and the finish line is at the center of the Earth...
You run for 213 yards to get out of the sun.
You make it to the surface of the Earth at 5 feet, 10 inches from the finish line.
(If the moon was eclipsing the sun, you would have run over it 122 yards from the finish line, and it would have a diameter of 3 feet, 2 inches.)
And Pluto's orbit? Well, it's 859 miles from the start line.
If the marathon had been in New York? It's kind of like running to Chicago. (It's a tad further than that.)
Oh, and on this scale, how fast is light travelling? 188 miles per hour. The world record human marathon speed was 13 miles per hour. So, 7% of the speed of light.
I once designed a scale model of the solar system for an elementary school class. The sun was a ping-pong ball. At this scale, earth is about three meters from the sun, and Pluto is a hundred meters away. Both earth and pluto at this scale are too small to see with the naked eye.
I did the NSF Young Scholars Program at MIT Haystack observatory the summer after 8th grade, and one of the events was a scale model of the solar system. The sun was a basketball, Jupiter was a golf ball, Saturn was one of those little rubber bouncy balls, and all the inner planets were grains of sand chosen to mimic their colors and relative sizes. Jupiter was off at the end of the parking lot, Saturn was in the grass at the edge of the site, and Uranus/Neptune/Pluto were omitted for lack of space.
Video I made to show distances between planets, with short stops at each one to show off its spectacular beauty. Earth was the most difficult to render due to lights on its night side; Mars proved challenging because of its atmosphere.
After recovering from a moment of awe, I wonder why can't the photos be in color if it has full spectrum visible light sensors? From the description:
"Ralph consists of three panchromatic (black-and-white) and four color imagers inside its Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC), as well as an infrared compositional mapping spectrometer called the Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA)."
New Horizons team member John Spencer answered that question on the Unmanned Spaceflight forum:
Yes, this was a single channel image (we wouldn't have held out on you if we'd had color!). Several of our closest MVIC images were b/w rather than color, because of limited time near closest approach- we can take B/W images faster than color ones, and they allow higher-res LORRI riders. We still don't know what color the haze is, though we'll have lower-resolution high-phase color images soon, which will answer that question.
I made one of these my cover image on Facebook and called it The Ice Mountains of Pluto, which is a Golden Age Science Fiction story title if I ever heard one. But this isn't SF! It's a real photo! That was taken by an atomic powered robot! Amazing...
Not entirely related, but I'm guessing you would enjoy reading Atomic Robo[1]. It's a comic (that has all 9 volumes for free online and the 10th is being released a page at a time daily) that follows an atomic powered robot built by Nikola Tesla.
Steven Hawking is a nemesis of Robo, Carl Sagan helped our hero get to Mars with Voyager, and there is a talking Dr. Dinosaur who claims that he time traveled to our time using crystals.
Huh, I would have assumed that a multispectral camera would have (false) colors. What does that mean here? The frequency response of each pixel's light sensor has multiple peaks instead of a nice 'bell curve' shape?
'False color' is a post processing step. It doesn't matter what your source of the signal is, at some step when you make the image ready for human consumption (especially for web consumption), you get to decide how to map each of your channels to RGB (or whatever). When your sensors are RGB, then mapping directly to RGB makes sense. But you could swap green and red, and end up with a 'False Color'.
Remember, within each channel (doesn't matter how broad its frequency sensitivity is), the values you get are 'grayscale'.
Its perfectly legitimate to take multi sprectral data and collapse it down to gray scale (this is after all how we fake grayscale pictures taken on most digital cameras now).
"The smooth expanse of the informally named icy plain Sputnik Planum (right) is flanked to the west (left) by rugged mountains up to 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) high, including the informally named Norgay Montes in the foreground and Hillary Montes on the skyline."
Again, the reality is stranger than fiction. I don't think any science fiction movie would have depicted a planet with a giant heart on it. It would have been just ridiculous!
I'm surprised no one has yet generated 3D models from what we've received so far. Surely we could somehow algorithmically extract at least partial height information from the shadows? I gave it a quick try previously but to no avail.
You'd start with detailed information about the camera itself, to factor out aberrations related to the lens and the sensor. After that I'd imagine the most efficient approach would be differential feature mapping from multiple photos taking into account the known facts about trajectory, speed etc.
Conceptually it's simple, just very very intensive in terms of the amount of computation required...but well within the capabilities of NASA or even dedicated amateur researchers. As I understand it we are still slowly downloading pictures from the flyby and there is more to come (although it will be of lower resolution from here on out if NASA is releasing them in order of acquisition). Once the complete set has been compiled I imagine that creating a 3d model would be a high priority.
You could look into how Google did their Moon and Mars virtual environments, though I understand they also had the benefit of radar/lidar mapping data as well as optical.
