New Horizons Pluto Probe May Find This Landscape On Dwarf Planet (VIDEO)

In the video above, a tiny sun floats through the haze over rocky ground. It's a bleak and alien view, but that's no scene from a science fiction film—it's Pluto.

With the long-awaited Pluto probe, New Horizons, entering the "homestretch" phase of its journey, scientists expect to see a landscape something like the artist's conception above when the probe arrives.

The atmosphere was the trickiest part to depict. Until recently, we didn't know that the dwarf planet sweats methane into its atmosphere when the sun heats it up, making the outer atmosphere actually warmer than what's beneath.

But this video may be missing one unexpected feature: rings. Planetary Science Institute senior scientist Henry Throop published research in 2011 on the possibility of Plutonian rings, which would pose a threat to the New Horizons craft if they turn out to be present.

The probe may be on its "homestretch," but we'll likely have to wait until its expected flyby date, in July 2015, to know for sure if this video is accurate.

Comments

[Whitestar12]

06:07 PM on 12/21/2012

The sun appears too big in the top video, but it looks about right in the bottom video.

[noahmarder]

02:12 AM on 02/22/2012

Pluto is, on average, about 39.5 times farther from the sun than is Earth. At its closest distance from the sun, Pluto is 29.7 AU (astronomical units, or the average distance from the Earth to the sun) from the sun. On Earth, the sun's angular diameter is about 32 arcminutes, so the sun's largest angular size on Pluto is a bit over 1 arcminute, or about as large as Venus ever appears from Earth.

For comparison, Charon has a diameter of about 1200 km and orbits about 19500 km from Pluto's center. This gives an angular diameter (from Pluto's surface) of between about 3.5 and 3.75 degrees (depending upon Charon's apparent altitude, as the size of Pluto is significant compared to the orbital distance). That is about 200 times the maximum apparent size of the sun.

Compare that with the video, and there are some serious discrepancies.

I am all for making science as accessible to people as possible, but misrepresentations like this are nothing but attention grabbers, undoubtedly with financial rather than scholarly motives, and actually leave people less knowledgeable than they were before seeing them.

[scripted]

08:15 AM on 02/22/2012

Well explained, the sun looked astonishingly big for Pluto in that video!

[bryanzth]

12:46 PM on 04/28/2012

Yep, just looking at it, I didn't believe that the Sun would be that large or bright. Just, um, kind of winging it from what we see in the sky here, what we see on Mars from the bots and orbiters and of course other pics from Cassini etc.

Who made this video, then? ;o)

BZ.

[AllegroTroppo]

12:08 AM on 02/21/2012

Spare me. If I wanted "artistic renditions' I'd watch 2001.
Real footage is newsworthy. But not this d-reck.

[cre8iveman]

10:47 AM on 02/21/2012

Illustrations are to help people like you who are a bit dim witted, in understanding scientific concepts.

[AllegroTroppo]

11:06 AM on 02/21/2012

cre8ivemans need to spoon-fed cute cartoons and snazzy imaginary graphics totally devoid of any interest to scientists and researchers.
People who do real science laugh at that nonsense.

[Franklin1776]

03:12 PM on 02/21/2012

Oh come on now... not everybody who uses illustrations to understand scientific concepts is dim witted :)

[Franklin1776]

03:11 PM on 02/21/2012

On the contrary, most scientific journal articles include a "cartoon" or a model figure describing what they think is going on.  Also, most scientific lectures include "cute cartoons" and "snazzy graphics" as well.  Using illustrations to convey a hypothesis or a model is used in every field of science that I can think of.  People who do real science are laughing at you right this very minute.

[SwiftJonathan]

04:51 PM on 02/21/2012

But even those have to be taken with caution. I recently spent quite some time with a "cartoon" in Science, depicting an ensemble of electromagnetic waves. I am still not sure they got it right. They might have, but it wasn't completely clear from the context if the illustration was actually correctly scaled and proportioned.

This is to say that "cartoons" in science are very hard to control in such a way that they convey exactly the right information. Sometimes the truth is plain boring to visualise (correctly) and the best way to visualise for humans is not correct... the Pluto imagery falls under that category, IMHO.

[cre8iveman]

07:34 PM on 02/21/2012

I will be your fan.

[MJinCanada]

12:30 AM on 02/18/2012

Very awesome.

And now I want some hot chocolate.

[natureboy10307]

12:26 PM on 02/17/2012

Hey man, i thought it was be being non sober and thinking it was me seeing it all alooooong. Att the end./

[salamanca1]

12:24 PM on 02/17/2012

Wow, I hope nobody with epilepsy watches that vid. The flashing test pattern at the end could set off a seizure.

[TAChem46032]

01:03 AM on 02/20/2012

I wish I'd read your post before I viewed it. Luckily, no harm this time. Thanks for the heads up anyway.

[salamanca1]

02:55 PM on 02/20/2012

I found it startling myself, and my remark was the first thing that came to mind.

[lifeandvictory]

11:02 AM on 02/17/2012

We need to look at our sun(s) in OUR sky !
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fusq5yrQ0jw

[salamanca1]

12:27 PM on 02/17/2012

That video is a worthless couple of minutes of the sun behind clouds.

[SwiftJonathan]

01:37 PM on 02/17/2012

These videos are always plain nonsense. The availability of cameras has increased by about three orders of magnitude over the last decades (because of cell phones), and still there has not been a single believable sighting of "weird" stuff out there.

[oneeasyrider]

01:38 AM on 02/17/2012

It's kind of wild to stare at the picture for five minutes or so and imagine a perfectly safe outpost and the reality of being so far out in the solar system. I'm not certain it would be so great. Seems like a much better task for robot missions. Star Trek makes is all seem great. Reality...not so much.

[Michael Thorne]

02:39 PM on 02/17/2012

With enough money and resources, anything can be accomplished. I've read that we have the technology to terraform mars...but it would require a joint effort from the entire world, and more funds than has ever been put into a project. Essentially, the world would have to come together and decide that it needs done...then, after terraform was completed and even before (in bio-domes) we could be living there. However, that's just what I've read.

[oneeasyrider]

06:16 PM on 02/17/2012

I'm supremely optimistic and believe in NASA; it has clout and resources to build an amazing technical team, but we aren't ready for a project that size. Mars is half as big as Earth and twice as big as the moon...that's big! Think about terraforming a land mass the size of the continental U.S.. And we don't have a reliable, efficient, mode of transport, yet.

Plus, any transformation would require industrial size operations, which would be immensely complicated. Can you imagine building a power plant on Mars? Logistics would be overwhelming. It would also take one hundred to two hundred years or more, once, whatever was required is set into motion and could be built to begin terraforming.

We're having trouble delivering James Webb space telescope to the launch pad for delivery a million miles from Earth. JWST should have launched last year, but won't be launched until 2018 or likely 2020 and nearly 8 billion over budget. So, with that reference, terraforming is most likely not possible right now, in the near future, and likely won't be possible until we have much better robotic technology to travel to Mars and do all required tasks for us.

Most of the west is barren because it's arid, but that's easier to fix than going to Mars. And both north and south pole are available, in addition to most of Australia.

[Sandra Heiston]

06:55 PM on 02/17/2012

Michael, terraformng Mars is a nice thought. But, there's this little problem; Mars doesn't have an active inner core. Without this, the planet won't retain water for long; not will it greatly minimize radiation bombardment to the planet's enviroment.

[2083]

07:34 PM on 02/17/2012

Better bring a sweater.

[oneeasyrider]

08:50 PM on 02/17/2012

Thanks for the chuckle. I was imagining all creature comforts I can think of including a loving affectionate partner/relationship in addition to other people as well, but still, it's just too isolated. Ever taken a cruise? Ships look massive from the outside, however, after a day or two...quickly, they become very small and restrictive. And no outpost is going to be as big as a cruise ship. No, it's just not for me.

[webwzrd]

05:43 PM on 02/16/2012

Science ROCKS!

[lensamy]

01:43 PM on 02/16/2012

This is amazing but when i saw this i was like how come the sun looks so large? Perhaps this is how a real video would look like if pluto is near its perihelion (getting closer to the sun). Pretty amazing.

[SwiftJonathan]

02:27 PM on 02/16/2012

Pluto never gets closer to the sun than about 30 astronomical units. At that distance the sun appears under an angle of 1 arc-minute, which is basically at the resolution limit of the human eye. So, no, the sun will never appear as anything than an extremely bright star on Pluto.

[salamanca1]

12:29 PM on 02/17/2012

Faved. If Pluto had any kind of atmosphere, diffusion of the light might make the sun appear marginally larger.

[nanjemoy]

01:37 PM on 02/16/2012

"But this video may be missing one unexpected feature:"

Newt?

[Claudia L]

11:56 AM on 02/16/2012

OK! I'm taking bets from posters on the Pluto sun.

All posters that think the sun in the video was:
Too SALLL
Too BIG
Just RIGHT

I'll keep a tally and get back to you on July 2015.

[nanjemoy]

01:37 PM on 02/16/2012

Way too big. It will look like a bright star.

[Claudia L]

05:40 PM on 02/16/2012

You are correct

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=picture+of+sun+from+outer+space&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Sun from outer space.

[SwiftJonathan]

02:29 PM on 02/16/2012

How will 2015 be of any help to you? The New Horizon camera is going to point down on Pluto, not up from the surface of Pluto. And it won't have the right focal length, either.

[Claudia L]

04:45 PM on 02/16/2012

You mean there is no way we could get a mirror out there on pluto? We'll never know? Didn't the Voyager pass by Pluto? I'll bet someone has a picture. I'm going to look for it.

[Claudia L]

10:21 PM on 02/16/2012

Found some pics of the sun from outer space
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=picture+of+sun+from+outer+space&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

[supercalifragilisticexpi]

10:26 AM on 02/16/2012

PPL need to stop saying the suns too large and look up "lens flare"
\

[SwiftJonathan]

11:38 AM on 02/16/2012

The sun is way too large. Unless they are looking at it with a 1000mm lens... which is basically a telescope.

[liveinhope23]

10:14 AM on 02/16/2012

"but that's no scene from a science fiction film—it's Pluto.
With the long-awaited Pluto probe, New Horizons, entering the "homestretch" phase of its journey, scientists expect to see a landscape something like the artist's conception above when the probe arrives."

Isn't that the very definition of a science fiction film? Stating that "it's Pluto" and then adding "scientists expect to see a landscape something like the artist's conception above" is entirely contradictory. It's not Pluto. It's an artist's conception of what it MIGHT look like from Pluto. Consequently, it's a science fiction film.

Duh.

[nanjemoy]

01:39 PM on 02/16/2012

Exactly. "This is no science fiction Pluto Landscape - it is the real Pluto Landscape, except for the Land Speeder. We added that."

[Social Construct]

09:45 AM on 02/16/2012

The surface is colder than the gas it blows off? You sure that this isn't an article about the GOP candidates?

Anyhoo, science is way groovy .... to the max.