Gateway To Hell, Giant Meteorite, Vacuum Decay, Bring Back Pluto !

Scattered across the ancient Mediterranean were alleged gateways to hell, according to Roman fables.  One such gateway remains at Hierapolis  in Turkey - Hooray ! We can throw the evil-doers (mostly high-ranking government officials) into the fiery pit from whence they came..but wait - it appears that toxic gas was responsible for the fate of sacrifices....

Ploutonion, named after the god Pluto...

Speaking of Pluto, New Horizons recently made a course correction, putting it on target for its rendezvous with Kuiper Belt object MU69 - 'Ultima Thule',  on Jan 1, 2019

Voyager 2 is nearing the beginning of interstellar space, following Voyager 1 , which left our solar system 6 years ago, and is now the farthest spacecraft from Earth, at 13 billion miles distant.

enamel pin available    Pin Alchemy @GreggB4

In the never - ending search for the elusive planet X , they have discovered an extremely distant object...personally, I just want Pluto re-instated as a planet. It's a lot closer - and we've 'been' there...just because it has an elliptical orbit is no reason to expel it from our solar system ! 

Bring Pluto Back Into The Fold...

A news report asks whether the JWST could spot alien life - the answer is possibly, but first they have to actually get the damn thing into space. Currently looking at a 2021 launch, it is running 14 years behind schedule - at this rate, you'd have a better chance taking pictures from the porthole of a Space X cruiser...

Speaking of the JWST, it appears that its predecessor is hobbling through space with stabiliser problems- down to one gyro from four...fingers crossed for the Hubble telescope, our 'eye-in-the-sky' since 1990

click here for more                 NASA/JPL/ University of Arizona

In other news we may have evidence of the first exomoon , which is great, but the current fad for deducing where something is by defining where it's NOT strikes me as possibly counter - productive*...discuss

A giant meteorite used as a doorstop in a rural farmhouse ? Sounds like the start of a science fiction...

Speaking of quantum computers, which we were not, or perhaps we were - here is a good / straight forward guide to that world of bizarreness

Another way to feel small and insignificant is to read this report on hypervelocity stars racing through our milky way...and the icing on the cake has to be this apocalyptic theory of vacuum decay ...honestly, what's the point ?

In a parting wave of cheerful news, the Ukraine has just announced plans to build a solar energy station...in Chernobyl.
If I were being crass, I'd say that every cloud has a silver lining.

Cheery Bye !


G

* I parallel this with our Anti-Social 'social' media culture, where a person is judged for what they didn't do- Person:  You didn't 'like' that anti-government joke
                 Me      :   I worry about 'humanising' the monsters.
                 Person:    So you're a nazi sympathiser, then ?
                 Me      :    WTF

Spaceship Graveyard

What happens to robot explorers when they die ?

There is no fabled final resting place like the elephants graveyard yet.

Curiosity landing site on Mars. 

Following the Pluto flypast which gave us a plethora of new information (still being assessed / downloaded),

New Horizons is now heading for the Kuiper belt, and with further funding,  possible analysis of another object - before it powers down , leaving us with a hunk of junk drifting in space, billions of miles away.

I personally hope that it continues for many years, but the truth is that we're lucky New Horizons didn't get struck already by space debris - and given the prevalence of random stuff in the Kuiper Belt, the odds are stacked against it.

Image taken from here:

Powered by Plutonium (ho-ho, almost funny), New Horizons is currently set to rendezvous either PT1 or PT3, (PT2 was eliminated).
The difference is that PT1 is smaller, but closer, therefore requiring less fuel, whereas PT3 is bigger but further away.
If the latter is chosen then the flyby is scheduled for 2019, at which point the fuel onboard should expire, and New Horizons will be freefloating.

Sadly for New Horizons, unlike the explorer Cassini, it will not be given a final blast of glory .

Cassini is currently tasked with photographing the moons of Saturn.

Cassini , should it last , will be repeatedly thrust through Saturns rings before plummeting down into its atmosphere at an incredible speed.,
A fiery send off in a blaze of glory, then.

Philae, the much beleagured lander on comet 67P may similarly go out in a blaze as the comet reaches its perihelion with our sun in August, erupting in a halo of ice and flame.

But New Horizons will just become smaller and smaller on the cosmic horizon, until, like Voyagers 1 and 2 before it, it's gone.

At this point, I should say that it qualifies as the first ever craft to approach Pluto system on a flypast, and its discoveries have been unrivalled.


And oh yes, I almost forgot - oops

There's also Curiosity, the Mars lander.
.
Still trundling around the hostile dust-bowl of the Martian surface, dutifully identifying different geological phenomena.

No spectacular ice flows or suchlike for Curiosity, no.

Just strata of quartz and such.

Curiositys progress.

Perhaps Curiosity is harbouring a robot dream of becoming a museum piece, when Mars is colonised.
And people will come to visit,
With their bored children in tow.

 There it will be, Curiosity, shiny and proud, if a little battered and worn.

Part of an exhibit showing the earliest unmanned pioneers of Mars.

Alongside Spirit, Opportunity, Sojourner and the wreckage of Beagle 2.

 Mars Rovers to scale...image from ExtremeTech.com

In fairness, quite a lot of wreckage, as Mars proved almost unassailable for many years.

But I digress.

Beneath that terraformed dome with its buzzing lights and hushed crowd,

I wonder whether anyone will wonder how things are,

back on Earth.

Earth from Mars.

A Planet Named Percival

Recently I wrote of Saturn, and in passing, mentioned the New Horizons voyage to Pluto, the tiny body on the outer edges of our solar system.
In doing so I felt compelled to further trace its history - and quite a charming one it is too -
Pluto, following the tradition of planets being named after old Greco - Romano gods, was named after the god of the underworld (who apparently could be invisible).
It is said that the idea of the underworld was evoked because the planet was presumed to be dark and cold, being so far from the sun - of course, ironically hell is traditionally scorchingly hot, so maybe Mercury would have been more appropriate ?
Regardless, at the present time, Pluto is in retrograde, therefore moving backwards in the firmament, and if you follow that sort of thing, you'll know the implications.
Think 'mirror universe' or 'Bizarro world '.
But I digress -
The whole story stems from a wealthy Bostonian man named Percival Lowell, who established an observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, in the U.S.A in 1894, and set about solving the mystery of what was then referred to as 'Planet X', an object so far distant that it was all but invisible even to the strongest telescopes of the day, and whose existence could seemingly only be deduced by its effects on other planetary bodies nearby.
Sadly, though, Percival Lowell passed away before the mystery world was finally discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930.

Clyde Tombaugh who discovered Pluto from photographic evidence

The discovery was made by comparison of photographs, using a device called a 'blink comparator'- a steampunk name if ever I heard of one.
However, the newly discovered 'planet X', still needed a name.
Early suggestions included 'Percival' in memory of the late Mr Lowell, but the final name 'Pluto' was given by an eleven year old English schoolgirl called Venetia Burney.
I include a link to an interview from  2006 between N.A.S.A. and Venetia Burney -Phair, part of which is reproduced below.
I found this to be a great collision of two worlds  (N.A.S.A. and Oxford) and Venetias selfless replies to be atypical of that old school sang-froid:

When you look back at your life, isn’t it exciting that there you were an 11 year old school girl who named this planet, and we’ve come so far technologically that now we can send a spacecraft all this distance in the solar system to this planet Pluto? 

Yes, it is absolutely amazing, but it is paralleled by almost everything that has happened in the world, hasn’t it. I mean we have stepped so far into the future as it were since the 1920’s and 1930’s. It leaves one absolutely stunned. 

Do you like to look up at the stars? 

Very much. Sadly it gets increasingly difficult to (do this). It’s so well lit around here that only the brightest stars really get a look-in unless we have a power outage of course. But occasionally if one is in the country, and it is a good clear night, it is absolutely wonderful. 

Of course, even that snippet of the interview is weighted towards the novelty angle of an eleven year old schoolgirl naming a planet - in fairness, Venetia was the grandaughter of  former librarian at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, (the wonderfully named Falconer Madan) whose brother, when Master of Science at Eton, had suggested the names Phobos and Deimos for the moons of Mars.
So there is a pedigree there, and speaking of pedigree, which we weren't -
 There is the cartoon Disney dog, and for some time, much to the consternation of Venetia and others, it was alleged that the planet had been named after the dog.
In truth, the character who became known as Pluto, was originally a bloodhound called 'Rover', and was not re-christened until one year after the rocky planetoid was named.

Actual Selfie on camera lens of PlutoLander

"ESO-L. Calçada - Pluto (by)" by ESO/L. Calçada - Pluto (Artist’s Impression). Licensed under CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons 

"It has now been satisfactorily proven that the dog was named after the planet rather than the other way round", Venetia told the BBC in 2006, "So, one is vindicated".

And finally, we can look forward to the first ever flypast  of Pluto later this year (July 14th), when the New Horizons craft, on its seemingly endless journey (well, nine years and counting - apparently it's heading out to the Kuiper Belt , which is a whole new unexplored territory).
The New Horizons spacecraft contains the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, former midwest American farmhand who discovered the little planet all those years ago.