New Horizons in the Outer Solar System

New Horizons in the Outer Solar System The outer solar system  is  the region of space  beyond the planet Neptune,  and the last frontier. The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft have passed beyond the orbit of Neptune, but have not encountered any more worlds. That all changed with the  New Horizons mission.  The spacecraft spent 10 years flying out to Pluto, and then swept past the ​dwarf planet  on July 14, 2015. It not only looked at Pluto and its five  known moons, but the spacecrafts cameras mapped part of the surface. Other instruments concentrated on finding out more about the atmosphere. New Horizons mages  show that Pluto has a complex surface  with icy plains made of nitrogen ice, surrounded by jagged mountains consisting mostly of water ice. It turns out that Pluto was far more fascinating than anyone expected!   Now that it has passed Pluto, New Horizons  will explore the Kuiper Belt - a region of the solar system that stretches out beyond the planet Neptune and  populated with so-called  Kuiper Belt Objects  (KBOs). The best-known KBOs are  dwarf planets  Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, Eris, and Haumea.  The mission has been approved to visit another dwarf planet called 2014 MU69, and will sweep past it on January 1, 2018. Luckily, this little world lies right along the missions flight path.   In the far distant future,  New Horizons  will enter the fringes of the Oort Cloud (the shell of icy particles that surrounds the solar system, named for  astronomer Jan Oort).   After that, it will traverse space forever.   New Horizons:ItsEyes and Ears New Horizons  science instruments were designed to answer questions about Pluto, such as: what does its surface look like? What surface features does it have, such as impact craters or canyons, or mountains?  Whats in its atmosphere? Lets take a look at the spacecraft and its specialized eyes and ears that have shown us so much about Pluto.   Ralph:  a high-resolution mapper with visible and infrared cameras to gather data that will help create very good maps of Pluto and Charon. Alice:  an imaging spectrometer sensitive to ultraviolet light, and built to probe Pluto’s atmosphere. A spectrometer separates light into its wavelengths, like a prism does. Alice  works to produce an image of the target at each wavelength, and will be able to study the â€Å"airglow† at Pluto. Airglow happens when gases in the atmosphere are excited (heated). Alice will track light from a distant star or the Sun through Pluto’s atmosphere to pick out wavelengths of light absorbed by Plutos air, which tells us what the atmosphere contains. REX:  short for radio experiment. It contains sophisticated electronics and is part of the radio telecommunications system. It can measure the weak radio emission from Pluto, and take the temperature of its night side.   LORRI:  the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager,a telescope with a 8.2-inch (20.8-centimeter) aperture that focuses visible light onto a charge coupled device (CCD). Near the time of closest approach, LORRI was built to look at Plutos surface at football-field size resolution.You can see some early images from LORRI here. Pluto travels through the solar wind, a stream of charged particles sweeping out from the Sun. So, New Horizons has the Solar Wind Around Pluto (SWAP) detector to measure charged particles from the solar wind to determine whether Pluto has a magnetosphere (a zone of protection created by its magnetic field) and how fast the Plutonian atmosphere is escaping. New Horizons has another plasma-sensing instrument called the Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation (PEPSSI). It will search for neutral atoms that escape Plutos atmosphere and subsequently become charged by their interaction with the solar wind. New Horizons involved college students from the University of Colorado as builders of the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter, which counts and measures the sizes of dust particles in interplanetary space.

Reason for Facebooks Age Limit

Reason for Facebook's Age Limit Have you ever tried to create a Facebook account and gotten this error message: You are ineligible to sign up for Facebook? If so, its very likely you dont meet Facebooks age limit. Facebook and other online social media sites and email services are prohibited by federal law from allowing children under 13 create accounts without the consent of their parents or legal guardians. If you were baffled after being turned away by Facebooks age limit, theres a clause right there in the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities you accept when you create a Facebook account: You will not use Facebook if you are under 13. Age Limit for Gmail and Yahoo! The same goes for web-based email services including Googles Gmail and Yahoo! Mail.​ If youre not 13 years old, youll get this message when trying to sign up for a Gmail account: Google could not create your account. In order to have a Google Account, you must meet certain age requirements. If youre under the age of 13 and try to sign up for a Yahoo! Mail account, youll also be turned away with this message: Yahoo! is concerned about the safety and privacy of all its users, particularly children. For this reason, parents of children under the age of 13 who wish to allow their children access to the Yahoo! Services must create a Yahoo! Family Account. Federal Law Sets Age Limit So why do Facebook, Gmail, and Yahoo! ban users under 13 without parental consent? Theyre required to under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, a federal law passed in 1998. The Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act has been updated since it was signed into law, including revisions that attempt to address the increased use of mobile devices such as iPhones and iPads and social networking services including Facebook and Google. Among the updates was a requirement that website and social media services cannot collect geolocation information, photographs or videos from users under the age of 13 without notifying and receiving consent from parents or guardians. How Some Youths Get Around the Age Limit Despite Facebooks age requirement and federal law, millions of underage users are known to have created accounts and maintain Facebook profiles. They do so by lying about their age, often times with full knowledge of their parents. In 2012, published reports estimated some 7.5 million children had Facebook accounts of the 900 million people who were using the social network at the time. Facebook said the number of underage users highlighted just how difficult it is to enforce age restrictions on the Internet, especially when parents want their children to access online content and services. Facebook allows users to report children under the age of 13. Note that well promptly delete the account of any child under the age of 13 thats reported to us through this form, the company states. Facebook is also working on a system that would allow children under 13 to create an account that would be linked to those held by their parents. Is the Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act Effective? Congress intended the Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act to protect youths from predatory marketing as well as stalking and kidnapping, both of which became more prevalent as access to the Internet and personal computers grew, according to the Federal Trade Commission, which is responsible for enforcing the law. But many companies have merely limited their marketing efforts toward users age 13 and older, meaning that children who lie about their age are very to be subjected to such campaigns and the use of their personal information. In 2010, a Pew Internet survey found that: Teens continue to be avid users of social networking websites – as of September 2009, 73% of online American teens ages 12 to 17 used an online social network website, a statistic that has continued to climb upwards from 55% in November 2006 and 65% in February 2008.