Image credit: NASA/ESA/CSA. This was one of the first images from the new James Webb Space Telescope.
Software credit: Stella 4d, available here.
A Cosmic Rhombic Dodecahedron
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Tag Archives: NASA
The First High-Resolution Images from Pluto Have Arrived, and They Bring a Major Mystery: Where Are the Impact Craters?
As new pics from the Pluto/Charon system become available, you can’t beat the image gallery at the New Horizons portion of NASA’s website to keep up with them, which is where I found this .gif file showing images of Pluto itself throughout the years. It culminates in the latest, and most detailed, image of any part of Pluto — a small portion of its surface. To see more of the latest pics, as they are released, I refer you to that web-page. NASA plans to keep it updated with the latest from the Pluto/Charon system, for months to come, as new images are transmitted, received, and processed.
The big surprise today is not the “heart of Pluto” that’s gotten so much press this week, but something newly discovered (and completely unexpected) with the latest small batch of new pics: on both Pluto and Charon, they can’t find a single impact crater. Not one. And that is just flat-out weird. Here, see for yourself (same image source): unexpected ice mountains, check; unexpectedly-smooth plains, check; craters — hey, the craters are missing!
According to everything we know, impact craters should be there. The ice mountains and numerous plains are mysteries, also, but it is the lack of craters which really has scientists puzzled this morning. Everyone expected to see lots of impact craters, myself included. Small worlds, so far from the sun, should have frozen internally long ago, based on present models, making them geologically dead, and therefore unable to “erase” impact craters (seen on dozens of other planets, dwarf planets, satellites, and asteroids) with surface-altering geological activity. This mass-erasure-of-craters happens on a only a few other solid bodies in the solar system, such as Earth, and Jupiter’s moon Io — both larger, and much warmer, than anything in the Pluto/Charon system. Some scientists are already going public with conjectures for the energy source needed to keep Pluto and Charon crater-free. However, I have yet to read any such conjecture which I find convincing, which is why I am not including them in this post. (Such guesswork is easy to find, though, here, among other places.)
On the other hand, the scientific community has had very little time, yet, to explain this new puzzle; there might be a convincing explanation out there by this time next week — or this could persist, as one of many mysteries in astronomy, for decades. At this point, it is too early to even venture a guess regarding when, if ever, this mystery will be solved.
Stephen Hawking, on the Reasons We Explore
The source for this screenshot-image, and quote, is the congratulatory message from Stephen Hawking to the entire New Horizons team at NASA, regarding the historic achievement of the fly-by through the Pluto/Charon system, earlier today. All I did was take the screenshot, and then add the quote to it.
Here is the entire message, as NASA posted it to YouTube.
Craters and Slopes Near the South Pole of the Moon Adorn the Faces of a Rhombic Enneacontahedron
The images on the faces of this polyhedron are based on information sent from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter, as seen at http://lunar.gsfc.nasa.gov/lola/feature-20110705.html and tweeted by @LRO_NASA, which has been happily tweeting about its fifth anniversary in a polar lunar orbit recently. I have no idea whether this is actually an A.I. onboard the LRO, or simply someone at NASA getting paid to have fun on Twitter.
To get these images from near the Lunar South Pole onto the faces of a rhombic enneacontahedron, and then create this rotating image, I used Stella 4d: Polyhedron Navigator. There is no better tool available for polyhedral research. To check this program out for yourself, simply visit www.software3d.com/Stella.php.
RobertLovesPi.net 