[X] My Assistant

[Habukaz]

BuzzFeed have gotten their hands on how the NH team plans to name features on both Pluto and Charon: http://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkasprak/the-vader-crater

The names give some clues for how the science team is interpreting things: you find things named fossa, vallis, cavus, rupes, dorsa and linea - all on Pluto.

EDIT: The maps on the mission website:

Pluto
Sputnik plain and surroundings
Charon

This post has been edited by Habukaz: Dec 20 2015, 09:11 PM

[Bill Harris]

Yes, it is possible to glue the icosahedron...

Great, then I'll piddle away some time with it. I have some printable card stock which should do well.

There was someone here (and maybe still is here) who specialized in producing really nice foldable globes of planetary bodies. More faces than an isocktawhatever (sorry, it's been decades since Mineralogy/Crystallography Classes and I don't feel like counting on my fingers in Latin) and really detailed.

Does anyone recall who that was?

--Bill

[chuckclark]

Might be me.

I made those foldable maps of several asteroids, and Phobos and Deimos that got a bit of attention a few years ago.

World maps with constant-scale natural boundaries, (samples at www.rightbasicbuilding.com).

As well as maps of spherical bodies that also fold to solids.

Trouble is, if trouble it be, that my maps of spherical bodies fold up to condensations of the sphere rather than nice spheres.

Other projection systems based on platonic solids generate better spheres. Some better than others: the icosahedral is pointy; the daisy-hemispheres is pretty good. The "apple-peel" example above is especially nice! I've not seen it before; someone should take a bow.)

So, anyway, mine come out lumpy or misshapen in an irregular manner that is a function of the natural boundary system selected as the map's border. The advantage is not so much the globe as it is the map itself, which is also irregular (sometimes highly irregular) but precisely so to display global patterns. A map of earth using (subsets of) continental divides is nice for contemplating global geomorphology, and can be rearranged for different perspectives on the subject.

I'm highly intrigued by the new information on Pluto, and begin to strategize a boundary system to experiment with, similar to what my coauthor and I did at last year's lpsc with Miranda, Ganymede, Dione and Enceladus.

Consider a bifurcating centroid-tree through Sputnik and then out the white lobes as a starting system. Not sure how far the apparent evidence could take it, perhaps branching again, from there.


It may be possible to identify points of interest and districts of distinction on an unseen hemisphere based on large-scale organization of an observed hemisphere. At least for bodies with shell-like crusts in existence long enough to have attained gross equilibrium. (This worked especially well on Ganymede, and not too bad on Dione, but of course this was reverse engineering because those surfaces are known in entirety or nearly so.) Miranda was another test, but of course the back side will remain unseen for the foreseeable future.

Pluto might be a nice test body for this conjecture, because some information about the hemisphere unobserved by New Horizons is in those 2011 blurry Hubble images, which some maps above have included.

No promises. I may get distracted by 67-P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Or maybe Bennu.