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8000 Miles Off Of Pluto's Surface. Today is the day!

tybrad said:
Pluto, as observed by humanity over the last 85 years. The pixellated first image is Tombaugh's photo plate image.

**snip**
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That is way cool.

Not quite really related, but I was actually in Green Bank, WV a week ago and toured the radio observatory there. Those antennas are mighty big when you're up next to them. For me it was an extra cool transition, I had just gotten off the Shay steam locomotive in Cass before driving over to Green Bank. Its a little odd going from coal-fired steam propulsion to the latest in electronic mapping of the universe.
 
That's great about Green Bank- I've never been there.

The mission team programmed New Horizons this week to send only a small fraction of the total data it carries; it will take the better part of a year to capture it all here at the DSN. Part of the reason is that the probe continues to do science, observing Pluto from its night side. The intention is to keep looking at it for about two more full rotations, or 12 Earth days in order to do occultation and spectroscopic gas analyses, gravimetric studies, solids composition, kinematical and dynamical mechanics studies, etc.
 
gadget73 said:
That is way cool.

Not quite really related, but I was actually in Green Bank, WV a week ago and toured the radio observatory there. Those antennas are mighty big when you're up next to them. For me it was an extra cool transition, I had just gotten off the Shay steam locomotive in Cass before driving over to Green Bank. Its a little odd going from coal-fired steam propulsion to the latest in electronic mapping of the universe.
Click to expand...

Do they still have all the older cars in use there? It was like a museum seeing cars in use that were likely 50 years old. That was when the Green Bank Telescope was still under construction.

Now back to our regular programming.
 
hi*ball said:
pluto_zpsxpms6svy.jpg
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"That's no...uh...former planet, it's a space station!"

I'm sure the conspiracy theorists will claim that the July 4 breakdown was staged in order to avoid observing the alien base.
 
Planet or not?

Currently ... not. It's considered a plutiod, along with Eris, Haumea, and Makemake ...

Plutoids are celestial bodies in orbit around the Sun at a semi-major axis greater than that of Neptune that have sufficient mass for their self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that they assume a hydrostatic equilibrium (near-spherical) shape.

Some include Ceres, but that's pretty small in comparison. Some also discount Haumea, as it's more egg shaped than round.

I exclude Pluto as it was a planet when I went to school, and ifn it was good enough for my grand daddy, it's good enough for me, dagnabit!
 
jhtstone said:
Do they still have all the older cars in use there? It was like a museum seeing cars in use that were likely 50 years old. That was when the Green Bank Telescope was still under construction.

Now back to our regular programming.
Click to expand...

Yes! 1960s Suburban diesels as service vehicles. The tour bus was a fairly modern Ford with a diesel but there were several golden oldies in active use still. The tour guide actually specifically mentioned that they weren't just abandoned old cars, but were used because they had no electronics to interfere with anything.
 
A Charon mystery. Charon is the (nearly double planet) major moon in the Plutonian system. A mountain in a moat? Huh? This will require some thinking. I do not have all of the information about it, but it may go something like this:

A large meteor impact that partially penetrated the surface but did not destroy the nucleus.
It could be a mountain too heavy for the substructure support. Charon's low gravity might rule this one out. Unlike the icy moons of giant planets, Pluto cannot be heated by gravitational interactions with a much larger planetary body. Some other process must be generating the mountainous landscapes seen here, and on Pluto.

This is a highly compressed image file- the full rez imagery will follow and may help in this puzzle's solution.

nh-charon-inset.jpg
 
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More publications from NASA in the past couple of hours:

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NASA Publications Today [July 17, 2015].

“This terrain is not easy to explain,” said Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team (GGI) at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. “The discovery of vast, craterless, very young plains on Pluto exceeds all pre-flyby expectations.”

"This fascinating icy plains region -- resembling frozen mud cracks on Earth -- has been informally named “Sputnik Planum” (Sputnik Plain) after the Earth’s first artificial satellite. It has a broken surface of irregularly-shaped segments, roughly 12 miles (20 kilometers) across, bordered by what appear to be shallow troughs. Some of these troughs have darker material within them, while others are traced by clumps of hills that appear to rise above the surrounding terrain. Elsewhere, the surface appears to be etched by fields of small pits that may have formed by a process called sublimation, in which ice turns directly from solid to gas, just as dry ice does on Earth.

Scientists have two working theories as to how these segments were formed. The irregular shapes may be the result of the contraction of surface materials, similar to what happens when mud dries. Alternatively, they may be a product of convection, similar to wax rising in a lava lamp. On Pluto, convection would occur within a surface layer of frozen carbon monoxide, methane and nitrogen, driven by the scant warmth of Pluto’s interior.

Pluto’s icy plains also display dark streaks that are a few miles long. These streaks appear to be aligned in the same direction and may have been produced by winds blowing across the frozen surface.

The Tuesday “heart of the heart” image was taken when New Horizons was 48,000 miles (77,000 kilometers) from Pluto, and shows features as small as one-half mile (1 kilometer) across. Mission scientists will learn more about these mysterious terrains from higher-resolution and stereo images that New Horizons will pull from its digital recorders and send back to Earth during the next year."

Cheers, og
 

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This is why we have to continue to explore. No one was expecting the mysteries that are being exposed by this encounter. Pluto is not what we always thought that it was.
 
Perhaps awestruck but not really surprising is the solar occultation experiment about one hour after close encounter. This is done at all planetary and other body studies as it reveals much atmospheric information, being backlit and all. Pluto's atmosphere, primarily of nitrogen, extends much further above its surface that Earth's does. That, I believe, is related to the weak gravity at Pluto and the abundance of available gas in the outer solar system as its genesis progressed.

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It is also found that there is a plasma tail associated with Pluto- caused by the solar wind stripping off Pluto's tenuous atmosphere. All SS bodies with an atmosphere have one of these. Some of the molecules that form the atmosphere have enough energy to overcome Pluto’s weak gravity and escape into space, where they are ionized by solar ultraviolet radiation. New Horizons actually detected the front of this shock wave as it approached Pluto so a tail detection was expected in the lee.

These and other measurements will enable the Solar Wind around Pluto (SWAP) instrument team to determine the rate at which Pluto loses its atmosphere and, in turn, will give us some insight into the evolution of Pluto’s atmosphere and surface.

03_bagenal_02.jpg
 
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