Dawn spacecraft to get up-close and personal with dwarf planet Ceres The Dawn spacecraft orbiting dwarf planet Ceres will soon make its final course change as NASA boffins set it up for a closest-ever flyby yet to get a warts-and-all look. Ceres is the largest body in the Asteroid Belt and orbits between Mars and Jupiter. Dawn's been there since 2015, mapping the surface from hundreds of miles …
" ... We can promote it to the 9th planet... just to REALLY mess things up. ;) "
Counting Earth's Luna as the fourth, Ceres would be the Fifth World. That would make Pluto "Planet Ten", or "Planet X" for at least two different reasons.
Yes, I know both Ceres and Pluto have little sisters but we can conveniently ignore those as " and assorted detritus" just to keep the joke going.
No one ever said Science had to be entirely humourless.
Probes to Mars and Titan are sterilised before launch (although the Soviets may not have done so with some of their early Mars probes). The type of sterilisation depends on the mission, but are formally known as COSPAR Category III and Category IV. Mars missions are further categorised depending on whether or not they are searching for life.
Dawn was classified as Category III requiring a ultra-high cleanroom. In part this category was due to the probe making a Mars flyby and there being a non-zero chance of it splashing onto Mars; but also because Ceres had previously been identified as a site where there may be evidence of life or its precursor molecules.
Probes to the Moon and Venus only need a lower Category II certification since neither is thought to be capable of supporting life as we know it. Category II requires the mission planners to inform the world of where the probe is going and the impact of it - well impacting - such as if it contains toxic materials or radioisotopes that could be hazardous in the future.
There is also a Category V which is reserved for sample-return missions; again this is subdivided into whether probes are going to potentially life-bearing destinations.
And finally, Category I is for missions going to places where there is no possibility of finding life or its precursors - such as solar probes.
How many smallness units are in the original orbit? Twelve micro-bananas?
Yes, I also hate "five times colder" and "sixty times darker".
Ceres is (at a very poor guess) 164 million miles from here (at that range, "here" is approximately the entire Earth, possibly including some of Texas). Dawn is 164 million miles closer to Ceres than Earth is. Or more, depending on where each world is in its orbit.
To be "ten times closer", Dawn would need to be one thousand, six hundred and forty million miles closer to Ceres than Earth is.
That makes no damned sense at all.
And it's a lot on the banana scale of measurement.
Why not use the perfectly sensible "... one tenth as far from ..." or something similar?
[The Alien because I never really understood how one could see 2C as five times colder than 10C.]
1/10 the distance, 1/5 the temperature (or 1/5 the heat, they're different), 1/60 the brightness.
Probably. Could also mean reducing the distance by ten times the amount they previously reduced it.
I hate that kind of phrasing too, as there's many ways to misinterpret it.
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