Pluto: The Story so Far

On July 14, the New Horizons space probe flew past the dwarf planet Pluto, more than 50 years after Mariner 2 successfully completed a Venus flyby, the first time a space probe visited another world. It's been a long time coming for Pluto. Voyager 1 was nearly sent to Pluto after its Saturn visit, but instead it performed a close flyby of Titan. Honestly, considering how little Voyager was able to learn about Titan given the presence of its thick, inscrutable atmosphere, Titan may not have been the best choice for Voyager. But finally, Pluto has gotten its first visit, and as is tradition with cutting edge science such as this, Pluto gave us quite a few surprises.

One of the most unusual features is actually a lack of a particular feature, namely craters. There just aren't any there. Charon, Pluto's most significant moon, has a few craters, but not nearly as many as one would expect. These are two cold, small bits of ice and rock 3 billion miles from the sun. There's no gas giant to exert any sort of tidal flexing as is the case with some moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn. Based on what we know, Pluto and Charon should both be dead worlds. But they're not. Pluto's surface seems to be less than 100 million years old, very young when it comes to geology.

Typically, worlds made up primarily of ice don't have big elevation changes. Look at Europa, the surface there is so smooth that a cue ball, expanded to Europa's size, would have greater elevation changes. So, it would make sense then for Pluto and Charon to be pretty much flat, right? Well, apparently not, because both have some pretty impressive topography. Charon has a canyon that could be up to 6 miles deep, just one of many canyons in a vast network that span for hundreds of miles. Charon also has a plain near the northern pole that scientists have been informally calling Mordor. I hope that name sticks.

Not to be completely outshone, Pluto has its fair share of interesting geography. Of course, there's the heart, which I believe has officially been termed Tombaugh Regio after Pluto's discoverer. Then there's the mountains. Now at the cold temperatures we're familiar with, water ice is pretty soft and not really capable of getting very high. Pluto is an entirely different sort of cold, cold enough for

strange and unusual ices like methane ice and nitrogen ice. At those temperatures, water ice because solid enough to build mountains. These are real mountains too, with the highest peaks soaring up over 10,000 feet. Sure, we've got higher here, but for a little chunk of basically ice, Pluto didn't do too badly for itself.

It's going to take a long time for New Horizons to send back all the data it collected during its brief visit, more than a year. Right now, we still barely know anything. I'm sure I'll be writing more posts about Pluto in the future as the data slowly trickles in. To wrap things up today, I just want to say that Pluto is not a planet, it just isn't big enough. That said, that doesn't make this achievement any less spectacular.

Battlebots 2015: Episode 3 Review

Well, here we are, the first 4 fights of the round of 16, and the first of the true eliminations. Fights were determined by seed, you know, 1 vs 16, 2 vs 15, and so on. It was a KO kind of night, with only 1 of 4 reaching the 3 minute mark, and honestly, the one that did go 3 minutes was over way before the buzzer ended the fight.

Ice Wave vs. Chomp

A horizontal spinning blade versus a bot whose sole strategy seemed to be spraying flame in the general direction of its opponents. Like seriously, why did Chomp get a wild card pick? It's big, fat, not sturdy in any way, and had clearly inferior weaponry. Ice Wave could have sat still and let Chomp run into it and still won.

Warhead vs. Stinger

At least Warhead makes sense as a wildcard. Unfortunately, it was thoroughly embarrassed once again, this time by Stinger. Stinger proved once again the effectiveness of a simple wedge in the Battlebox, especially if that wedge can lift. Warhead couldn't get past the wedge, and so it was dominated the entire time. I did think it was pretty cool of the Stinger team to keep Warhead in the fight the entire time, since the fight was basically over after 20 seconds. They put on a good show, at the very least.

Ghost Raptor vs. Warrior Clan

Finally, a fight where both robots actually won their first fight. Good of Ghost Raptor to get rid of the blade, that thing was literally useless, and the wedge/lifting arm is probably a better option. I say probably, because Warrior Clan did a whole lot of nothing the entire fight. With its opponent literally breaking down, all Ghost Raptor had to do was not break down first, and it didn't, so it got an extremely boring KO.

Plan X vs. Bronco

Basically, unless you have an extremely destructive robot and get a really good shot off first, if your robot cannot self-right or cannot drive upside down, you have basically no hope against a flipper, especially against Bronco. Plan X is not destructive, it cannot self right and it can't drive upside down. The fight lasted 30 seconds. It only took one flip.

Random Thoughts to close:

Finally some Killsaws in this episode. They do actually work.

How exactly were the seeds determined? Were they random, or was some thought put into them?

I noticed that Bronco is fighting Stinger in the quarterfinals. That might be an interesting fight.

Speaking of future fights, they put Lock-Jaw and Overhaul together again for their round of 16 fight. Hoping for more controversy, I guess.