Category Archives: Pluto

astronomy, New Horizons mission, Pluto

Speak for Earth

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The New Horizons Message Initiative

Many years ago the two Voyager spacecraft left on their missions to the outer planets and beyond. Each carries a golden record that contains digitized version of the sounds and images of Earth. It was and is an inspiring idea and one that tickles the imagination of anyone enamored of space exploration. The Voyagers, both on their way out of the solar system (one has, in fact entered interstellar space already), now bear a record of our time on Earth for anyone to find and interpret.

However, the Voyagers aren’t the only ones headed out. The Pioneer spacecraft are on their endless journey, and the New Horizons mission is on its way to Pluto and beyond. None of them carry any golden records, and artist Jon Lomberg has set out to correct that oversight for the New Horizons mission, which will pass by Pluto in July 2015. He has started the New Horizons Message Initiative, a petition to have an electronic message placed aboard the spacecraft. As Jon states on the project page, the form and content are still TBD, but would likely be images and some sounds.

The poster for the New Horizons Message Initiative
The poster for the New Horizons Message Initiative

Jon is a space artist; you may have seen much of his work in the original Cosmos series with Carl Sagan. He was the design director for the original Voyager golden record. He also designed and worked on the amazing Galaxy Garden on the Big Island of Hawai’i that I wrote about some months ago.

The New Horizons Message Initiative has a stellar board of advisors, and they are now gathering signatures to petition NASA to allow the design of some kind of message to transmit to New Horizons. Once NASA has approved, then a Kickstarter campaign will begin to raise money to work up the message and develop the techniques of storing the message aboard the spacecraft. In addition, the group plans an educational outreach component to excite people’s imaginations about the concept of sending a new message out to the universe.

Like the idea? Many other people do, including the Principal Investigator for New Horizons and an old friend, Dr. Alan Stern. Join him, me and such folks as actor Levar Burton in support of sending a message from Earth to the cosmos. Check out the Web page and sign the petition. I did—what’s not to like about letting the cosmos know we are here?

 

international astronomical union, Pluto

Pluto’s Moons Get Names

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P4 and P5 Get Their Official Names

In modern times, the honor of suggesting names for celestial objects is rightfully reserved for the person or persons who discover them. They send their list of names to the International Astronomical Union, which has the job of certifying the suggested names. A committee at the IAU checks to make sure the names aren’t already taken, that they fit whatever naming scheme may be in place for the category of objects, and then if everything checks out, they approve the names. The actual discoverers can use whatever means they like to come up with names. Some objects, such as Venus, have naming schemes that dictate the types of names that can be chosen. In Venus’s case, features are named after prominent women, goddess names, etc.  Other objects, such as exoplanets, don’t have naming schemes beyond the current practice of using the name of the star and alphabet letters to designate a given planet. The Uwingu group has been busily compiling lists of popularly chosen names for exoplanet discoverers to use if they like.

The Pluto system with its newly named moons Styx and Kerberos. Courtesy SETI Institute.

Popular naming came into play when two new moons were discovered orbiting the dwarf planet Pluto. They were quickly designated P4 and P5, and the team that discovered had the privilege of suggesting permanent names. The team, led by astronomer Mark Showalter, a senior research scientist at the SETI Institute, decided to have the Institute run a public naming contest called Pluto Rocks. People could send in whatever names they felt were appropriate, and the contest then forwarded the most popular names for consideration to the IAU.

Yesterday the SETI Institute announced that the IAU had formally approved the  names Kerberos for P4 and Styx, for P5. These fit well with the mythological status of Pluto as the guardian of the underworld. In Greek mythology, Kerberos is a three-headed dog who guards the entrance to Hades (the underworld), while Styx is the river that separates Hades from the world of the living.

Pluto is gaining increasing attention as the New Horizons spacecraft gets closer to its 2015 goal of exploring this intriguing system that lies in the far reaches of the solar system. Certainly Pluto’s moons will come under intense scrutiny, and the spacecraft could discover more moons too small to see even with Hubble’s sharp eye.