07-08-2014, 11:22 AM
Magda Hassan Wrote:I love astronomy and cosmology too but I find some things very mysterious and confusing. Like Pluto. Planet one day and not the next. What's with that? They couldn't tell? So close and in our solar system. Yet they can take photos of other galaxies in brilliant colour and detail. Le sigh...
But seriously, these posts are just amazing. The collaborative science involved over so many years. Beautiful. I hope they have moved on from NASA's 286 computers....
I could explain Pluto if you really want...anyway, it was there long before anyone on Earth considered it anything..and is still there. Its loss of status was by vote in the astronomical community - and was not agreed by all. It is a 'call' for the smaller bodies. Some beyond Pluto are even larger than Pluto. In fact, Pluto will long outlive the Earth, which will be swallowed up by the then expanding sun in a few billion years.
Rosetta just shows that technology and science can be used for good, for exploration, for pure knowledge - and not how it is all too often used to make more weapons of war and control. This comet to me looks like a pock marked bathtub rubber duck. In November Rosetta will send down a lander with ice screws for feet and hope to attach to the surface and do tests on many things. In the next month, it will slowly get closer and closer, with better and better photos of the surface, which to most astronomers surprise seems to NOT be ice, but dust or crust of some kind....though it is known that a large part of the object is water ice. It is also surprisingly warm. -70C can almost be found on Earth, and this object is now 3x further from the sun than the Earth ever is - and getting only 1/10th the sun's energy.
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass