So I’m still trying to sort my life out after the craziness of last week, and the news has piled up. Here’s a quick rundown of two cool things. I’ll have more later.
1) SpaceX, a private space company and the first to have a (mostly) successful rocket launch, has done their first multi-engine test. Here’s the deal: they have a smallish rocket called the Falcon 1. They are working on the next-generation rocket, the Falcon 9, which will be big enough to take people into orbit. The F9 will use nine engines total, wrapped around the base of the rocket. These engines, called Merlin, generate about 90,000 pounds of thrust each, so nine of them will make about 800,000 pounds of thrust. While that’s only a quarter of the thrust of a single Shuttle solid rocket booster, the F9 is considerably lighter, so it’ll be enough. This is very cool news! I’m a supporter of space privatization, at least for doing things like "routine" access to low Earth orbit.
2) The New Horizons probe is making its way to Pluto, the biggest of the Kuiper Belt objects (or the only planet to have been kicked out of the club, depending on how you feel). From 3.6 billion kilometers away it snapped this image of the tiny iceball (click to embiggen). It only looks like a dot because Pluto is dinky, and terribly far away; from that distance it’s only about 0.1 arcseconds across. That’s the size of a single Hubble camera pixel, for example. Or, to give you a better idea, it’s the size a ping pong ball would look like if it were 60 kilometers away!
Emily has the scoop on this if you want more details.
January 30th, 2008 at 10:14 am
BA says: “Pluto, the biggest of the Kuiper Belt objects”
What about Eris? Was it demoted too?
January 30th, 2008 at 10:20 am
Eris is a scattered disc object.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eris_%28dwarf_planet%29
January 30th, 2008 at 10:33 am
Actually Pluto is not the “only planet” kicked out of the club. Ceres, Pallas and Vesta were all called “planets” when first discovered.
January 30th, 2008 at 10:40 am
Ill be danged- Eris-while bigger- was “kicked out” of the Kupier belt. So at least the objects have something in common.
January 30th, 2008 at 10:41 am
Okay, so who’s going out there to rip off it’s epaulettes!
Or, I went to the IAU and all I got was this lousy T-shirt http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/science/8964/?cpg=clrss
January 30th, 2008 at 10:43 am
So are all “planet x” hypotheses dead?
January 30th, 2008 at 10:53 am
Glad to see SpaceX is in the running to take up the launch slack. Maybe we won’t even have to worry about NASA and their lack of an appropriate launch vehicle,,,
Gary 7
January 30th, 2008 at 10:58 am
Thanks a lot, moggers87, for shattering my ego! For a while there, I thought I was right and BA was wrong.
“scattered disc object”… I suppose it was some compromise to let Pluto lovers think it was still special in some way.
January 30th, 2008 at 10:59 am
Don’t forget Juno, it was demoted from planet-hood too! (Along with Ceres, Pallas, and Vesta, which ozprof already mentioned.)
January 30th, 2008 at 11:01 am
Off topic:
Wasn’t Falcon 7 Birdman’s boss?
Ok, I’m stupid, I read last night some creationist garbage. It’s contagious people!
January 30th, 2008 at 11:06 am
I’m sorry, but I’m a purist. Pluto will always be a planet in my books. No, seriously. They are older Astronomy books.
January 30th, 2008 at 11:16 am
Ceres was sort of re-planetized, though… it’s back up to “dwarf planet” now, at any rate, with Pluto and Eris. Only three so far, but just wait for Pallas and Charon and Sedna and Quaoar and … a bunch more, anyhow, as long as they are judged sufficiently spherical. But darn it, “dwarf planet” is as far as I’m willing to go for that bunch of ice-ridden wimps.
January 30th, 2008 at 11:41 am
I was shopping at a local “educational store” a few weeks ago, when I spotted a bunch of Solar System models. They had the Sun and eight(!) planets, looking very similar to a Sun-plus-nine-planets box I had seen last year. However, the plastic molding they were boxed in had this curiously-empty ninth spherical “bump”.
See here
(I hope that link posted correctly.)
January 30th, 2008 at 11:47 am
Darnit, I want to see Pluto NOW!
I don’t care if they “demoted” it (Pluto remains pluto you know?). I been told all my youth that thing was the 9th planet and we never got to visit the thing. I wanted to see it since FOREVER! Why can’t this spacecraft go faster? <_<
January 30th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
So is SeaLaunch not a private space company?
http://www.boeing.com/special/sea-launch/
As per their Wikipedia article they have launched 25 rockets with two failures and one partial failure.
January 30th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
What’s with the faint vertical grey lines in the picture? CCD malfunction?
January 30th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
I don’t mind private space exploration, or even the commercialization of space, but the minute someone puts an advertisement in orbit is the minute I start building a megawatt laser with a tracking mount.
January 30th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
I’m still bitter about the whole Pluto thing. In fact, I even bought this bumper sticker for my car. I like to think that’s the reason people are always blowing their horns at me when I drive….
January 30th, 2008 at 7:45 pm
Sea Launch uses rockets based on (or converted from) a Russian ICBM.
Space-X’s Falcon rockets are AFIK, an original design.
Ariane is (or originally was) government funded. as were the Protons, Saturns, shuttles, etc., i.e. those launchers not directly derived from military missiles.
I think Space-X is the first to get close to orbit with a privately developed rocket. (Their last launch the 2nd stage shut down a few minutes early or it would have made it. I think they are trying again soon.)
January 31st, 2008 at 2:13 am
What’s with the faint vertical grey lines in the picture? CCD malfunction?
Not so much a malfunction as a characteristic, says this message:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/mpml/message/20397
January 31st, 2008 at 6:45 am
Ahhh, I understand now. Thanks Buzz.
January 31st, 2008 at 7:52 am
I guess you could say that Pluto is the longest tenured member ever to get kicked out of the (full) planet club.
Why can’t it go faster?
1. It would cost more $ to make it go faster
2. Since it is a flyby mission, the other cost would be time: the faster it goes, the faster the flyby and therefore less time on site. When it finally arrives, all of us who have been wishing it would get there faster will be wishing it was going slower so it would have more time to observe Pluto.
January 31st, 2008 at 8:59 am
I’ve always heard researchers call the Scattered Disc part of the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt, so Eris should be considered a KBO in that regard. (There are three populations of KBOs, as currently classified: classical KBOs, scattered disc objects, and resonant objects.)