Pluto! (Part three, a slow trickle) (Off-Topic)

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Thursday, September 17, 2015, 18:58 (3361 days ago)

A 3 kb/sec trickle, to be precise. That's the rate at which the Deep Space Network site in Madrid is currently receiving data from New Horizons spacecraft, at the time of this post. Not the best bitrate, but then, Madrid is several billion miles from the transmitter. It'll be many months before everything from the Pluto flyby gets back.

Anyway, WHOA. Click on the panorama at the top of the article for a high-res view; 780 miles wide, taken 11,000 miles away and showing mountains 11,000 ft high!

Notable topics in the article:
-There's some vertical streaking in the image which seems to be haze, illuminated by the sun, shadowed by mountains. Pluto may have day-to-day weather changes.
-It looks like there's a glacial cycle similar to Earth's. Except with funky stuff like nitrogen ice instead of water ice.