p9, v6.29 — The World Around Us — Mountain Views News

The World Around Us

Mountain Views News Saturday, July 21, 2012

MVNews this week: Page 9

THE WORLD AROUND US

Mountain Views News Saturday July 21, 2012

HUBBLE DISCOVERS A FIFTH MOON ORBITING PLUTO

A team of astronomers using the
Hubble Space Telescope is reporting
the discovery of another moon
orbiting the icy dwarf planet Pluto.

The moon is estimated to be irregular
in shape and 6 to 15 miles across. It
is in a 58,000-mile-diameter circular
orbit around Pluto that is assumed to
be co-planar with the other satellites
in the system.

“The moons form a series of neatly
nested orbits, a bit like Russian dolls,”
said team lead Mark Showalter of
the SETI Institute in Mountain View,
Calif.

The discovery increases the number
of known moons orbiting Pluto to five.

The Pluto team is intrigued that
such a small planet can have such a
complex collection of satellites. The
new discovery provides additional
clues for unraveling how the Pluto
system formed and evolved. The
favored theory is that all the moons
are relics of a collision between Pluto
and another large Kuiper belt object
billions of years ago.

The new detection will help scientists
navigate NASA’s New Horizons
spacecraft through the Pluto system
in 2015, when it makes an historic and
long-awaited high-speed flyby of the distant world.

The team is using Hubble’s powerful vision to scour the Pluto
system to uncover potential hazards to the New Horizons spacecraft.
Moving past the dwarf planet at a speed of 30,000 miles per hour,
New Horizons could be destroyed in a collision with even a BB-
shot-size piece of orbital debris.

“The discovery of so many small moons indirectly tells us that
there must be lots of small particles lurking unseen in the Pluto
system,” said Harold Weaver of the Johns Hopkins University
Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.

“The inventory of the Pluto system we’re taking now with Hubble
will help the New Horizons team design a safer trajectory for the
spacecraft,” added Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in
Boulder, Colo., the mission’s principal investigator. Pluto’s largest
moon, Charon, was discovered in 1978 in observations made at the
United States Naval Observatory
in Washington, D.C. Hubble
observations in 2006 uncovered
two additional small moons, Nix
and Hydra. In 2011 another moon,
P4, was found in Hubble data.

Provisionally designated S/2012
(134340) 1, the latest moon was
detected in nine separate sets of
images taken by Hubble’s Wide
Field Camera 3 on June 26, 27, 29,
and July 3 and 9.

In the years following the New
Horizons Pluto flyby, astronomers
plan to use the infrared vision of
Hubble’s planned successor, NASA’s
James Webb Space Telescope, for
follow-up observations. The Webb
telescope will be able to measure
the surface chemistry of Pluto, its
moons, and many other bodies
that lie beyond Pluto in the distant
Kuiper Belt.

SHOULD PLUTO BE A PLANET?

The controversy about whether
Pluto should be classified as a dwarf
planet or a full-fledged planet is
nowhere near over—at least, as far
as the public is concerned. Where
do you stand? Here’s an opinion
poll being conducted by web-based
magazine Space.com, and you can cast your vote if you like:

http://www.space.com/16534-poll-pluto-dwarf-planet-status.
html?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_
campaign=SP_07112012

You can contact Bob Eklund at: b.eklund@MtnViewsNews.com.

VAMPIRE-IZE IT!

It’s been a great summer! Have you enjoyed all the essential activities:
the beach, barbequing, and hanging out with friends? Of course, summer
is also a special time to witness displays of refined talent in spectacular
extravaganzas! No, I don’t mean the Olympics, although they’re fun, too.
I’m talking about the long awaited summer movies!

I’m no movie buff, but it seems like most movies have the same predictable ingredients;
action, special effects, sex, blood, and guts. (No big revelation there.) But there’s one movie
this summer that stands out as the most audaciously formulaic flick of the year --”Abraham
Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”

It’s true, I shouldn’t judge a movie I haven’t seen. I do plan to see it once it’s available
at Red Box. But for now, I’m
too cheap to buy theater tickets.
Maybe I’ll read the book when I
have absolutely nothing better to
do. “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire
Hunter” has all the stock elements
we’d expect from a movie these
days. It has action, (Abe learns
how to swing his axe around like
a Jedi master’s light saber in “Star
Wars”), special effects (‘nuff said),
sex (the trailer shows some skin,
so one can assume), and blood
(a.k.a. vampire juice).

I could go on forever about the
vampire craze in entertainment.
How long can publishing houses
and movie producers ride this
wave of vampire obsession? What
started it all? (Don’t say Bram
Stoker’s Dracula.) Was it “Buffy,
the Vampire Slayer”? That was
back in 1997! There are 15-year
olds whose whole lives have been
spent during the great American
vampire era. It’s gotten so big that
it should define their generation.
We’ve got “Generation X,” and then
“Generation V” for “Vampire.”
But I digress.

What fascinates me about this new spin on the old theme is that its main character
is Abraham Lincoln! Lincoln is great for documentaries, but as the subject of a summer
movie thriller? Everyone knows that the main character has to be sexy. Let’s consider some
current and classic action flicks. “The Dark Night Rises” and “The Amazing Spider-Man”
have Christian Bale and Andrew Garfield in muscle suits and leotards. It’s hard for us to
think of Tom Cruise as anything, apart from his recent dumping by Katie Holmes. But try
to remember him in all the “Mission Impossibles.”

The creators of “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” couldn’t have chosen a less sexy
historical figure if they tried! Even Lincoln himself defamed his appearance in his famous
rebuttal, “If I were two-faced, do you think I’d be wearing this one?” Not only was Lincoln
far from being eye candy, his wife, Mary Todd, resembled an angry Pillsbury Dough Boy in
a dress! And she was a nut on top of that! You can’t tell me that this movie’s going to portray
her as a dumpy, raving lunatic! The similarity between actress Mary Elizabeth Winstead and
Mary Todd Lincoln end with their first names. It’s like comparing Angelina Jolie to Robin
Williams as “Mrs. Doughtfire.”

Ludicrous as it sounds, I look forward to seeing this film. Watching a former president
flying through the air like a character from “Crouching Tiger” has to be great. I can’t wait to
see what masterpieces Hollywood will churn out next! I’ve noticed a new trend about middle
aged women “finding themselves” in India. Maybe they can come out with something about
Baby Boomers flocking to India in search of the fountain of youth. But then an older Thelma
and Louise discover that the secret behind the others’ rejuvenation is that they’re turned into
vampires! Now the women must learn Taekwondo and don body suits to stop the vampires
and save the world! If you see this, remember --you read it here first!

WHEN IT RAINS

Mac users were forced to admit that their world is becoming a much more different place
than it used to be. Apple fans are wont to (and probably still can) boast that their OS has
been basically immune from the attacks that Windows users have weathered as a fact of life
online. But now a spike in security threats has made it abundantly clear that the online bad
guys are no longer ignoring the Mac OS platform.

Earlier this month computer security researchers had detected a version of malware called
“Trojan Backdoor.Flashback” that had formed a botnet comprised of 600,000 infected
Macs. In this case the malware targeted vulnerability in the Java component of the Mac OS.
Oracle, the makers of the Java software platform, released a fix for the infection and Apple
included the fix in a subsequent software update package for users of OS X versions 10.6
and 10.7. Users of older versions of Mac OS were advised to disable Java in order to avoid
infection.

The latest Mac security threat, a variant of the “LuckyCat” attack, takes advantage of an
exploit in Microsoft Word documents, giving a remote attacker the ability to plunder
infected systems, and steal data remotely. This exploit has been around for almost three
years now, and is completely preventable if the system is kept up-to-date with the latest
security updates. The fact that these threats are only now getting widespread publicity
indicates how historically lackadaisical Mac users have been toward security and it might be
time for this attitude to change.

In the past, malicious attacks on the Mac platform have been few and far between. More
than 90 percent of the desktop market share used to go to Windows, so that’s where
cybercriminals focused their time. But in recent months, OS X adoption has been rising,
and similarly the number of threats (like last year’s MacDefender Trojan Horse) have been
rising. The main point to consider is that the bad guys haven’t really created any new ways of
breaking into your system but have increasingly come to exploit cross-platform programs
like Microsoft Office, Adobe PDF products, Java, and Flash and in the process are reaping
more “rewards” for their efforts by creating malware that affects both Windows and Mac
platforms. As the efforts by the bad guys to find better ways to target the Mac OS platform,

Mac security researchers would do well to take advantage of the road already travelled by
the Windows guys. Regardless of the Apple strategy for dealing with the increased attention
from the online bad guys, keep in mind that this is only beginning. When it rains, it pours.

We’d like to hear from you! What’s on YOUR Mind?