Pondering Pluto
Sure has been busy out there, thataway. Probes to Comet 67P, probes to Mars, probes to gas giants and their moons, New Horizons does a flyby shooting of Pluto and its neighbors. Lots of information has been sent back to Earth. Nice pictures, too. Some people may be old enough to remember Sputnik 1 going "beep...beep...beep..." Only this, and nothing more. Quite a contrast.
Unfortunately for long-age advocates, the solar system isn't acting "old", but more like it's thousands of years old — which is what biblical creationists have been saying all along. Assessing data from Pluto has been startling to secular scientists, and they have been hard pressed to explain away the youthful features found in that neighborhood. Wonder what will happen when more data arrives?
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| Artist's conception of New Horizons visiting Pluto, with moon Charon in the distance. Image credit: NASA/JHU APL/SwRI/Steve Gribben |
With the recent flyby of Pluto now in the history books, it’s time to compare what scientists predicted with what they found.To read the rest, click on "The New Pluto".
It’s been very fulfilling for senior citizens who watched the birth of the space program in 1957 to see the final leg of space reconnaissance of our solar system. Sure, Pluto has been demoted to a ‘dwarf planet’, but for most old-school students, it was the Ninth Planet—the only one never visited by spacecraft. That all changed on 14 July, 2015 with the phenomenally successful flyby of Pluto and its moons by the New Horizons spacecraft.
We should take this opportunity to thank the many engineers and scientists who took the world along vicariously on this great adventure to the far reaches of our solar system. It took copious amounts of intelligent design to outfit a spacecraft, ‘fly’ it for 9½ years, and operate it with just one shot at success.
Data from the encounter will continue trickling down to earth for months to come, but enough has arrived to take stock of the big news. Interpreting data is very different from obtaining it.