Mir and Pluto

[ElPelado]

I have two things to talk about:
1) The MIR: First of all i haev a simpel question, what does MIR mean?
My really question is: some time ago I saw (and many of you too, I think) the movie Armagedon. In that movie, when the two shuttles begin their trips to the asteroid, they first dock at the Mir right? when in the Mir, the "astronauts" walk normaly, I mean, there is gravity there. How is that possible??? And what about the ISS? Is there gravity too?

2) As we may already know, Pluto is no longer considered a planet like the other 8 (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturno, Uranus, Neptune), it is more like a comet or an asteroid. There is people saying that many keep telling that it is a planet just because it was discovered after more than 10 years of searching for "a planet", and when it was found, they were sure that it was a planet, AND because of the fact that it was discovered by a northamerican man.
So, if its not a planet, it should not appear in Celestia as a planet. For example:
-it should not be selected when pressing the [9] button.
-its' orbit should be colored as comets' or asteroids' comets.
-its' orbit should not appear when we enable just planet textures.

Can this be done?

[JackHiggins]

1) Mir doesn't actually stand for anything- it means "Peace" in russian - I think!

Armageddon is one of the worst movies ever made. Selective gravity, on mir (or "The russian space station" as they keep calling it) and on the comet, are only 2 small points. Check out Phil Plait's bad movies page at http://badastronomy.com/bad/movies/armpitageddon.html for more details on why this film sucked big-time...

The ISS, if it's ever completeted, is supposed to have a centrifuged crew sleeping compartment, with some artifical gravity (not sure how much exactly...) No craft before now has had this ability, except when firing their rockets to accelerate or decelerate.

2) Actually Pluto has been given dual status- it's a planet AND a KBO (Kuiper belt object)! I don't really think it should be called a planet, but that's not the point...! If something bigger is discovered out past neptune, it will probably lose the planet status.

The discovery of pluto was based on something that was believed to be disturbing the orbits of neptune & uranus. But, in fact, there were errors in the data, and nothing was disturbing the orbits of these planets! So pluto was discovered entirely by chance, even though the discoverer Clyde Tombaugh thought he was looking where it should have been!

I don't really think it matters whether he was north american or not- whoever discovered pluto would have had it called a planet because no-one knew about all the other kuiper belt objects back in the 30's...

Since the IAU still gives it dual status, I think it should be left as a planet, because it is nearly twice as big as Quaoar (the next biggest KBO).

Of course, if you want to change it in your own solarsys.ssc just change

Code: Select all

Class "planet"

to

Code: Select all

Class "asteroid"

or whatever you want!