I'm personally keeping logs of our IRC channel since it started, and the end of the old one. I haven't released them publicly for fear of breaching someone's privacy or whatever. I'd be willing to share them if requested.

If the remote machine has a wider pipe, it could download things, compress them, and then serve that to you. This is the Opera Mini strategy.

It's not what firethief was talking about, but it's one way that that could be the case.

For those curious, this hypothetical mission would take longer to get to Pluto than New Horizons because it wouldn't just be flying by, it would need time to set up a slower approach and enter into orbit around Pluto and give the lander time to collect the sample.

It would also need enough fuel to then change trajectories and return to Earth, as well as all of the fuel for the lander. These types of sample return missions are very expensive, which is why there have not been many. There were a few somewhat famous ones to the moon in the 60s and 70s, one that collected solar wind particles (barely had to leave the Earth's neighborhood, no landing required), one that flew through the tail of a comet and collected dust (no landing required), and one by JAXA that retrieved a sample from an asteroid. It's ultimately cheaper to bring the science/instrumentation to the object than the other way around, and those are the types of missions that get funding.

A rover is far more likely than a sample return mission, but even so I wouldn't put money on a return to Pluto in the very near future.

Well, you need someone like Alan Stern. He invested his whole career into New Horizons and he is pretty much the only reason why it happened and became the success that it is and has been so far.

You know, his son Jordan is about to start grad school... Unfortunately I don't think that he's up for following in his father's footsteps. He's a math major in undergrad rather than anything astronomy related. Understandable that he wanted the chance to prove himself on his own rather than live in his father's shadow.

But my point is that we need someone with that kind of drive and determination to get a mission through. The type of person where no matter what happens they keep trying until they finish the job. Maybe whoever was in charge of the Hayabusa?

There are definitely some, but there are very few, and in particular no large ones.

Crater counting is one of the easiest ways to date the surface of a body.

Very nice! I live in Orlando and am involved with an Astronomy Society here. We have a few 8" telescopes and one 21" (in the Robinson Observatory). I know your pain of trying to cut through light pollution (damn Disney) and humidity and poor conditions. Have fun with all of that!

Pluto's density does not suggest that it is porous like a comet or asteroid.

Nope, because its gravity is pulling it together enough to compress the rocks together and make it not porous. This is the point that I was trying to make, sorry if it wasn't clear.

You get to a point size-wise where eventually you stop just getting bigger, and you start getting denser. This happens when the force of gravity overcomes a force stopping things from compressing. There are many such forces, and thus many such points where "object gets bigger, then starts getting denser, then starts getting bigger again, then denser again, etc" as you add more and more mass.

Something is reforming the surface of Pluto!

Again! Speculation on my part! Take it with a grain of salt! Please don't use concrete language like "is" or else I'll regret posting my thoughts and will take them down so that people don't get confused.

Those aren't facts, that's a hypothesis from me.

Why would you want to go outside, when inside is where all of the cool space stuff is?

Pluto does rotate on its side, but its pole isn't (currently) always facing the sun. In fact, the sun is currently mostly heating the equator. Here is its current orientation, and more details.

Dammit! I leave for lunch and all of this discussion happens.

francopoli did a very good job of answering your question, but there is one thing that I'd like to clarify.

Pluto swinging inside the orbit of Neptune would not bring it close enough to the sun to outgas significantly enough to cause the atmosphere that we are seeing today. This is the mystery of "what heated up Pluto and caused these gasses to sublimate" that francopoli was talking about in his posts. It didn't get close enough to the sun, so what heated it up? As he pointed out, it isn't tidal interactions with another large body, the usual other source of heating in our solar system.

And to expand on this mystery:

1. Pluto has an atmosphere that should have been stripped away by now by the solar wind. This is what is currently happening to it and is creating the tail. The question is, what is replenishing it?

2. Pluto, like any other comet, is full of ices which sublimate into gasses when heated. This is what causes the atmospheres and the tails on comets that venture closer to the sun. This is where that gas is coming from, the question is, what's heating the planet?

The three common, go-to sources of heat in a body in our solarsystem are

1. The sun (Pluto is too far away)

2. Tidal forces (Pluto is already tidally locked to Charon, francopoli gave a good description of this)

3. Latent heat of formation (Pluto isn't big enough for this to have stuck around. Source: Mercury's has not stuck around, and it is bigger than Pluto).

So what's causing this heat? Well first here are some other facts that I'd like you to consider:

With all comets, as the ices sublimate off, they leave the rock behind. With smaller comets, this rock is left behind in an almost "haphazard" fashion. The rock stays where it was, and it might roll a bit downhill towards the comet's center of mass. This leads them to be to porous and misshapen (like 67P).

----Leaving facts behind, entering speculation. Everything below here is an educated guess from someone who has never studied Pluto in particular, but has taken graduate level Planetary Science classes, including (recently) one in geophysics (the relevant subject here). It is very possible that I think that I know more than I do, so take everything below with a grain of salt----

My thoughts/hypothesis/speculation that might be completely wrong (feel free to NOT read this, it might be wrong)?

I think that there is something special about Pluto that we haven't seen with other large bodies that makes it take longer to lose its latent heat. And that special thing is its composition and size. The only other object similar to it in both of these respects is Triton, but Triton has tidal heating that might mask this effect.

Remember how the other comets are misshapen and porous? Well, Pluto is big enough to pull itself back into a spherical shape (hydrostatic equilibrium). Its gravity is strong enough to pull the rocks back down and close up these porous "gaps" left by the escaping volatiles.

Perhaps some event (possibly an impact) imparted a lot of heat into Pluto in the somewhat recent past and caused a lot of ices to sublimate all at once, and now the atmosphere is slowly returning to equilibrium. As Pluto reforms itself into a spherical shape, it would create all sorts of active geology like mountains and canyons and other things that we are seeing there that we weren't expecting. This active geology would also cover up the scars of this event, much like what happens on the Earth, or possibly by the refreezing of these gasses, creating an ice layer that would hide the craters.

This isn't too unreasonable. While the Earth has plate tectonics and thus is only geologically active along faults and at hot spot volcanoes, this would be happening to Pluto everywhere, and the surface rock would be being reformed everywhere, because all of Pluto would have been outgassing and all of Pluto would now be compressing.

(CAUTION: EXTREME SPECULATION IN THIS PARAGRAPH) Perhaps the "heart" is the impact site, and the heat from impact melted a lot of the ices and created a muddy crater that had a low enough viscosity to flow into becoming flat again (no crater), and even flow some mud into the surrounding areas. I would suspect that the original impact crater was MUCH MUCH smaller than the heart, and the rest of the heart would be caused by this mud flowing out. We already know that this region resembles frozen mud cracks on the Earth, and is rich in Carbon Monoxide. This would fit with liquid Carbon Monoxide mixing with the rocks and dirt on the surface and creating a mud that then refroze. In fact, this feature is so consistent with a freezing mud flow, that I would personally be surprised if it wasn't caused by some sort of local heating, causing what I just described.

The hypothesis that I just described fills in a lot of the gaps in knowledge and questions that we currently have about Pluto, BUT keep in mind that I am by no means a Pluto expert. There are definitely things about Pluto that people have studied and that the experts know about that I do not, and it is also very possible that one of those things could throw my whole hypothesis out of the window. I'm mostly just typing this out so that I have a record of what I thought "way back when", so that I can objectively see how right I was later on, and as "food for thought" for you guys. Again, it may all be wrong, so take it with a grain of salt.

Was anyone expecting an active geology?

There was a little bit of speculation because of the atmosphere that was detected by the Hubble, but largely, no. That idea was mostly ignored because we weren't sure what could CAUSE an active geology on an object as small as Pluto.

And yes atmosphere is being mentioned, and that can be a factor, but we are talking thinner than the Martian atmosphere here.

Yes, Pluto's atmosphere is incredibly thin, but something to remember is that while on something like Mars, the only means of the atmosphere destroying evidence of craters is erosive factors like wind, on Pluto the atmosphere is also in equilibrium with the ices on the surface. Ice will "frost" out of the atmosphere and blanket the surface, covering up a lot of features. The ice is melting more on the parts that face the sun and depositing more on the parts that are not. This difference isn't a lot, but it's enough to add up over time. Pluto is also, as you mentioned in your previous post, orbiting "on its side", which means that this deposited ice is melted off of the summer side and redeposited on the winter side over and over for each orbital period. This type of cycling could easily cover up evidence of craters.

this preliminary data is showing it acting more like a comet than a planet.

This was expected. Compositionally, Pluto IS a comet, just a very large one. The tail was expected when we saw that the atmosphere was so large. We expected its atmosphere to be in the process of being depleted. The tail always points away from the sun, so we couldn't have detected it until we got behind it, this is just confirmation.

Ah interesting. Does it also remove counting badges?

Very cool! Not my cup of tea personally, sounds like the worst of E&M, fluid dynamics and atmospheric science all rolled into one. But still, always cool to see another astronomer around.

But yeah, I feel you about the lack of pretty pictures. I've got some nice plots for you to ogle, but nothing of the actual planets. Just some blobby pixelated images of their host stars.

Still, the pretty stuff is cool and generates a lot of public excitement which is always nice.

Also, I wouldn't sell your field short. I'm assuming that you're studying plasma around the sun, and those CMEs and stuff can be pretty beautiful.

EDIT: I added some stuff.

I do! Exoplanets are my field in particular.

Well like most things in our solar system, cometary size distributions follow a power law, Pluto just happens to be at the larger, rarer end of that spectrum.

Well, maybe not, but I'm so used to hydrodynamics as it applies to atmospheres that adding in charges and magnetic fields just seems like it would make everything so much more complicated. You're a braver man than I to tackle it. Nice meeting you!

That doesn't mean that we couldn't monetize them. As amouseinmyhouse said:

Your value add model is an interesting one and it's worked successfully in games for quite some time. The basic gist to the video game version is to open the platform as a simple, but complete, space where you gain access to more functionality through time. You can bypass the time restrictions through money. Take Team Fortress 2 for example. All of the weapons in the game that have effect on actual game play can be unlocked through actual game play, or you can spend a few bucks and buy the weapons now. Such a system could easily apply to hubski where you earn gold tokens through the slow acclimation of social capital, or you can buy them in bulk with bit capital. This is one of the more interesting systems for me, but creating such a system would take a lot of time and consideration.

And unfortunately because of our economic system, the ones that do put profit first tend to succeed and get more press and become more successful.

Maybe not the best time to mention it, but everyone should join the hubski irc channel!

#hubski on freenode!

I'm really interested in what could have caused such a large region of smoothness. Recent cryolava activity?

I'm not saying that the line is anywhere near distinct, but the extremes of the hard/soft science spectrum are intrinsically and fundamentally different.

While physics has a good mathematical and theoretical backing, and the experiments and the theory build off of each other and check each other's power, you don't have so much variety in sources of information in softer sciences.

You mention double blind studies, but again, those only exist in softer sciences because of the systematics and complexity of dealing with human/biological subjects. The article mentions meta studies as the top of the evidencial pyramid, but they don't exist in harder sciences because they don't make any sense in that context.

Of course all experiments are subject to systematics. I would never claim anything different. However the point that I raised in my edit (posted before your reply) still applies. The very grounds on which science is done is fundamentally different in different fields because of the type of research possible and the types of data available.

For example, in Astronomy (my field), you can't really set up an experiment where you create a nebula and watch it form into a start system. You also can't watch one system go through its entire life because of the timescales involved. Experiments don't really work on this scale. Instead, you have to rely on observational and theoretical techniques to study how things work. Further, in Astronomy (and chemistry and atmospheric science and others) you have physics to fall back on to predict how things will happen. (EDIT: To clarify, this was my point with the climate change example in the first post. The human researcher's beliefs won't change what the thermometer will read and it won't change how the winds will blow. They might change how another human will react. An important note is that they might also impact which data gets recorded, for example if the researcher takes Christmas off every year they might miss something important in the data at that time, or if the researcher only takes data once every few days they might miss some of the smaller scale/period signals etc.)

The physics and the math don't change because of the placebo effect. Unfortunately, people do.

In harder fields, you study these more objective things, in softer fields you study softer and more subjective things that can be more easily influenced.

Again, I'm not saying that there is no room for misinterpretation or for systematics (although in harder sciences, the systematics are more physical and quantifiable in nature), just that many of the specific grievances in the article are less applicable to a harder science.

That said, there are still human/researcher biases to take into account with the harder sciences, they're just very different.

Interesting read in the citation.

Yes I concede that many physics papers will compile the results of previous groups to get more realistic numbers as a combination of their work and experiments. Although it isn't called a meta analysis in hard science fields, it is basically the same thing. Forgive me for not thinking about that very thoroughly, it's 6 AM for me and I've been awake for a while :)

From my experience with the soft sciences (which is admittedly not much beyond an undergraduate level, unlike hard sciences), their mathematical backing is less rigorous than you would find in, say physics. You won't really find any mathematical proofs in a biology paper. All fields APPLY math to model and statistics to approximate errors and variations, but only the harder sciences USE mathematical logic and proof structure in order to predict a relationship between unstudied things from mathematical/geometrical underpinnings of the universe. The softer fields use the math to explain, but only the harder fields can use it to predict and to build off of the previous knowledge base.

If you have any counterexamples to the things in my last paragraph I would love to see them, for I know of none.

My original complaint was more of a semantic issue that I had with him repeatedly saying "science" when he meant psychology/medicine specifically. This is something that I've seen a lot from people in some fields more than others and it is a pet peeve of mine.

It really isn't a planet. It's a comet, and more specifically a Kuiper Belt Object. Compositionally, dynamically and formationally, it is vastly different from both the terrestrial and the gassy planets. It instead fits in with comets and its fellow KBOs, just like how asteroids fit in better with fellow asteroids than with the terrestrial planets.

In my opinion, Mercury should also be demoted. It is much more like an asteroid than the other terrestrial planets and should be classified as such.

That's not to say that there isn't much to be learned from these bodies. As this article describes, there is a lot of really interesting science that they can reveal. They are the largest objects in their different non-planet groups, but that's what makes them so interesting. They aren't planets. They're something else and that means that they can tell us things that planets cannot. But they shouldn't be considered planets because they aren't.