It's A Small World After All
Jul. 16th, 2015 08:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAs the days counted down to New Horizon's closest encounter with Pluto I was making regular checks of the mission's official site, but I suppose I was also worrying about how nothing can be taken for granted when it comes to outer space. If I wasn't thinking that before the "safe mode" incident at about ten days to go, first hearing about that little interruption from a weblog post with a possibly panicking title did impress it into my mind. Even when more approach pictures started appearing again and, with hardly any days left, Pluto crossed the threshold of "Mars on the eve of Mariner," I was still wondering about the possibility of each new picture being the best we'd get. While "one space pebble in the wrong place" did come to mind, so did "equipment malfunction" or just "some other subtle bug in a complex system," kindling uncertain thoughts that even if the probe did manage to turn back to Earth after its closest encounter, it just might have lost track of where everything was and wound up taking pictures of empty space...
On the evening after closest encounter, I tuned in to the official NASA streaming video and saw mission control picking up the carrier just as the hosts cut to them; the positive telemetry followed after not too much of a wait. With that small reassurance, even as I held to my resolve to wait for the first encounter pictures to be radioed back, the very last picture sent back before encounter was starting to impress itself on my mind.
Even more than the "heart" people had been picking up on just days before, something as small as the picture being in colour might have done it for me. With "orange" modulating to "peach," all of a sudden the old mental models and artists' conceptions that could be brought to mind which had always seemed to suggest "it's _cold_ out there," with a good dose of "perpetual twilight" too, now seemed replaced by "well-lit, inviting, and oddly pleasant." Even the recent artists' renderings with their dramatic large, ragged-edged blotches of orange and black promoting the encounter hadn't been quite the same, and yet I didn't quite seem to be missing them either. It was also rather different from "craters on craters," the less interesting and not that unique yet seemingly quite plausible possibility I'd been wondering about, and that mattered a bit more.
Driving back from work the day after closest encounter, I heard on the radio that the first encounter pictures had come back, and was intrigued to hear there weren't any craters showing up in the close-up. As soon as I could check on the picture, it also got my attention. In these first days of instant analysis, Pluto does seem more "active" than a small body without a gas giant to provide some tidal squeezing would seem to be, and rather more distinctive than "just one lump that happened to be noticed decades before any of the other ones and was hard-sold to start with." I can see the point of "looking at things in context as a system," and understand there can never be "nine" planets going around the sun again (we're already well above "ten" or even the "eleven" science fiction would invoke to be really daring), but when I wonder about being told "this is science, hard truths that have to be faced without sentiment!", I can now start to think there might be a hard truth to, just as most of the universe is made of something other than what we're made of, there being "worlds innumerable" out beyond the tidy interior too.
On the evening after closest encounter, I tuned in to the official NASA streaming video and saw mission control picking up the carrier just as the hosts cut to them; the positive telemetry followed after not too much of a wait. With that small reassurance, even as I held to my resolve to wait for the first encounter pictures to be radioed back, the very last picture sent back before encounter was starting to impress itself on my mind.
Even more than the "heart" people had been picking up on just days before, something as small as the picture being in colour might have done it for me. With "orange" modulating to "peach," all of a sudden the old mental models and artists' conceptions that could be brought to mind which had always seemed to suggest "it's _cold_ out there," with a good dose of "perpetual twilight" too, now seemed replaced by "well-lit, inviting, and oddly pleasant." Even the recent artists' renderings with their dramatic large, ragged-edged blotches of orange and black promoting the encounter hadn't been quite the same, and yet I didn't quite seem to be missing them either. It was also rather different from "craters on craters," the less interesting and not that unique yet seemingly quite plausible possibility I'd been wondering about, and that mattered a bit more.
Driving back from work the day after closest encounter, I heard on the radio that the first encounter pictures had come back, and was intrigued to hear there weren't any craters showing up in the close-up. As soon as I could check on the picture, it also got my attention. In these first days of instant analysis, Pluto does seem more "active" than a small body without a gas giant to provide some tidal squeezing would seem to be, and rather more distinctive than "just one lump that happened to be noticed decades before any of the other ones and was hard-sold to start with." I can see the point of "looking at things in context as a system," and understand there can never be "nine" planets going around the sun again (we're already well above "ten" or even the "eleven" science fiction would invoke to be really daring), but when I wonder about being told "this is science, hard truths that have to be faced without sentiment!", I can now start to think there might be a hard truth to, just as most of the universe is made of something other than what we're made of, there being "worlds innumerable" out beyond the tidy interior too.