Eleven days til New Horizons fly-by of Pluto!!

[lastlib]

F***ing PLUTO!! (This has got to be like shooting a B-B at a pebble on Mars, and hitting it!)

Follow New Horizons mission at http://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons or on Facebook here

I F***ing LOVE science!

[longship]

1. A decade in the happening.

Actually more than that if you include the planning.

Also, it is the fastest object ever launched.

R&K

[jakeXT]

2. New Horizons spacecraft sees strange black spots on Pluto's equator

Recent images taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft reveal four mysterious dark spots that appear to be evenly spaced along Pluto's equator.

Each of the spots is about 300 miles in diameter and has a surface area similar in size to the state of Mississippi, NASA scientists report.

"It's a real puzzle -- we don't know what the spots are, and we can't wait to find out," said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colo., in a statement.

The images show just how much lighter the mottled tan surface of Pluto is compared to the moody gray of its largest moon, Charon. The discrepancy in their color is yet another mystery that researchers hope to resolve soon.

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-new-horizons-pluto-spots-20150702-story.html

[lastlib]

3. This mission is going to revolutionize our entire concept of Pluto,

its moons, and even the Kuiper belt. It will likely generate as many questions as it answers. Before this, we didn't even know what to ask because we had so little knowledge about Pluto and its environment.

[Warpy]

4. The four black dots will be on the other side during the fly-by

but a month ago, they didn't know there were four black dots on the planetoid!

Oh, yeah, this stuff blows my hair back!