New Horizons Pluto Mission update thread

[Drone]

New images

 

[Drone]

part II

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

This July 14, 2015 photo released by NASA on Thursday, Sept. 17, 2015 shows the atmosphere and surface features of Pluto, lit from behind by the sun. It was made 15 minutes after the New Horizons' spacecraft's closest approach.

In this small section of the larger crescent image of Pluto, the setting sun illuminates a fog or near-surface haze, which is cut by the parallel shadows of many local hills and small mountains. The image was taken from a distance of 11,000 miles (18,000 kilometers), and the width of the image is 115 miles (185km)

Images downlinked in the past few days have more than doubled the amount of Pluto's surface seen at resolutions as good as 400 metres per pixel.


'The surface of Pluto is every bit as complex as that of Mars,' said Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team at Nasa's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

'The randomly jumbled mountains might be huge blocks of hard water ice floating within a vast, denser, softer deposit of frozen nitrogen within the region informally named Sputnik Planum.'

New images also show the most heavily cratered, and oldest, terrain yet seen by New Horizons on Pluto next to the youngest, most crater-free icy plains.

There might even be a field of dark wind-blown dunes, among other possibilities.

'Seeing dunes on Pluto - if that is what they are - would be completely wild, because Pluto's atmosphere today is so thin,' said William B. McKinnon, a GGI deputy lead from Washington University, St. Louis. 'Either Pluto had a thicker atmosphere in the past, or some process we haven't figured out is at work. It's a head-scratcher.'

Discoveries being made from the new imagery are not limited to Pluto's surface.

Better images of Pluto's moons Charon, Nix, and Hydra will be released Friday at the raw images site for New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), revealing that each moon is unique and that big moon Charon's geological past was a tortured one.

Images returned in the past days have also revealed that Pluto's global atmospheric haze has many more layers than scientists realised, and that the haze actually creates a twilight effect that softly illuminates nightside terrain near sunset, making them visible to the cameras aboard New Horizons.

'This bonus twilight view is a wonderful gift that Pluto has handed to us,' said John Spencer, a GGI deputy lead from SwRI.

'Now we can study geology in terrain that we never expected to see.'

The New Horizons spacecraft is now more than 3 billion miles (about 5 billion kilometers) from Earth, and more than 43 million miles (69 million kilometers) beyond Pluto.

The spacecraft is healthy and all systems are operating normally.


Earlier this month Nasa revealed a new animation of New Horizon's mission to Pluto lets you ride shotgun with the probe as it passes the dwarf planet.

New Horizons completed its near decade-long journey to Pluto in July, with a historic flyby that captures the best images ever seen of the icy world.

Nasa has now collected these images into a mesmerising 23-second video, showing the flyby from the spacecraft's point of view.

During its closest approach, the spacecraft came to within 7,800 miles (12,500km) of Pluto's icy surface, travelling at 30,800 mph (49,600 km/h).

The video includes a pass showing the atmospheric glow of Pluto lit by the sun and a look at Charon, Pluto's largest moon.
shed new light on Pluto’s mountains, glaciers and plains.
'This animation, made with real images taken by New Horizons, begins with Pluto flying in for its close-up on July 14,' Nasa writes on the video description.

 

[TheMailMan78]

Wish we would find life already.

 

[Ikaruga]

Wish we would find life already.

We already found it with ALH84001, even Clinton announced it, but people want little green man or gtfo.

 

[R-T-B]

We already found it with ALH84001, even Clinton announced it, but people want little green man or gtfo.

Unfortunately, ALH84001 is not conclusive proof. It is pretty strong evidence though.

 

[dorsetknob]

Unfortunately, ALH84001 is not conclusive proof. It is pretty strong evidence though.

On the downside

Only way to prove that is a boots on the ground Manned mission or a lucky Sample return mission
Not going to happen (in the next 50 years anyway)

on the upside

They cannot disprove it

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

15 minutes after its closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft looked back toward the sun and captured this near-sunset view of the rugged, icy mountains and flat ice plains extending to Pluto’s horizon. The smooth expanse of the informally named icy plain Sputnik Planum (right) is flanked to the west (left) by rugged mountains up to 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) high, including the informally named Norgay Montes in the foreground and Hillary Montes on the skyline. To the right, east of Sputnik, rougher terrain is cut by apparent glaciers. The backlighting highlights more than a dozen layers of haze in Pluto’s tenuous but distended atmosphere.
The image was taken from a distance of 11,000 miles (18,000 kilometers) to Pluto; the scene is 780 miles (1,250 kilometers) wide. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Ice (probably frozen nitrogen) that appears to have accumulated on the uplands on the right side of this 390-mile (630-kilometer) wide image is draining from Pluto’s mountains onto the informally named Sputnik Planum through the 2- to 5-mile (3- to 8- kilometer) wide valleys indicated by the red arrows. The flow front of the ice moving into Sputnik Planum is outlined by the blue arrows. The origin of the ridges and pits on the right side of the image remains uncertain.
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

This image covers the same region as the image above, but is re-projected from the oblique, backlit view shown in the new crescent image of Pluto.

 

[Drone]

 

[Drone]

two "new" images
(different filters)

 

[Drone]

New big ass pngs, take a lot of time to load, so just click and see

http://blogs.nasa.gov/pluto/wp-content/uploads/sites/253/2015/09/nh-Figure22.png
http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/pmap_pmc195_8092-shenk.jpg
http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/lorri_rider.png
http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/detail_lorri_rider.jpg

 

[Drone]

Part II

Methane Map

Giant pic of Pluto

 

[Ikaruga]

Beautiful

Original 8000x8000 (65MB) version: http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/crop_p_color2_enhanced_release.png

 

[twilyth]

A couple more photos here - http://www.businessinsider.com/latest-pluto-photos-in-color-2015-9

 

[Drone]

Charon

 

[Drone]

Nice hq footage

 

[dorsetknob]

how to obtain your own model of Charon

Buy a packet of Maltesers insert one sweet into mouth suck off most of the chocolate skin
spit out the core of the sweet and there your small moon Charon

Any one else notice the cosmic similarity ?

the Universe gods of Fate only suck Maltesers either that or some one at NASA is photoshopping their sweets

 

[dorsetknob]

New Horizons captured this high-resolution enhanced colour view of Charon just before its closest approach on 14 July this year.
Image credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

The smoothness of plains on Charon, researchers have theorised, may suggest that a type of cold volcanic activity – known as cryovolcanism – had occurred on the moon.

“The team is discussing the possibility that an internal water ocean could have frozen long ago, and the resulting volume change could have led to Charon cracking open, allowing water-based lavas to reach the surface at that time,” said New Horizons' team member Paul Schenk from the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston

 

[Drone]

New images of Hydra and Nix

 

[dorsetknob]

New colour photo of Pluto's Atmosphere

New Horizons: Probe captures Pluto's blue hazes
The New Horizons mission has returned its first colour image of Pluto's atmospheric hazes and shows them to have a blue tinge.

It is a consequence of the way sunlight is scattered by haze particles, say scientists.
The US space agency probe continues to downlink the information gathered during its historic flyby of the dwarf planet on 14 July.
As this data arrives on Earth, the team processes it and studies it.
A black and white image of the hazes was previously released, showing them to be as high as 130km above Pluto's surface.
That picture came from the Lorri camera and was acquired as New Horizons departed the dwarf, looking back to see sunlight skim the edge of the distant world.
This new view comes from the Ralph colour camera system. Again, it is taken with Pluto backlit.
Like Earth, the dwarf has a predominantly nitrogen atmosphere (albeit much more sparse).
But it is the interaction of this nitrogen with the Sun's ultraviolet light, in presence of another atmospheric constituent, methane, that is able to create the chunky haze particles.
"That striking blue tint tells us about the size and composition of the haze particles," said New Horizons team member Carly Howett from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado.
"A blue sky often results from scattering of sunlight by very small particles. On Earth, those particles are very tiny nitrogen molecules. On Pluto they appear to be larger - but still relatively small - soot-like particles we call tholins."
The principal investigator on the mission, Alan Stern, had teased Pluto fans in recent days, telling them to expect something special from this week's regular Thursday release of new images.
"Who would have expected a blue sky in the Kuiper Belt? It's gorgeous," he said in a Nasa statement.
If you stood on Pluto and looked straight up, the sky would actually appear black because of the rarity of the atmosphere.
"The haze is pretty thin, so you'd mostly see the colour of the haze as blue sunrises and sunsets," Dr Howett explained to BBC News.
The other important piece of news to come out concerns the detection of water-ice at many locations on the 2,300km-wide dwarf's surface.
The other important piece of news to come out concerns the detection of water-ice at many locations on the 2,300km-wide dwarf's surface.
More volatile ices tend to dominate the surface, so understanding why the water-ice is seen strongly in some places is an interesting observation that will need to be followed up, the team says.
"We expected water-ice to be there, but we've searched for water-ice in Pluto's spectrum for decades and not seen it before now," tweeted Alex Parker, also from SwRI.
Since 14 July, New Horizons has moved more than 100 million km beyond Pluto. And this puts it about five billion km from Earth.
The vast separation makes for very low data rates. It will be well into 2016 before all the information is on the ground.

Care of bbc

 

[Drone]

Bigger image and article from New Horizons

http://www.nasa.gov/nh/nh-finds-blue-skies-and-water-ice-on-pluto

 

[Drone]

new images of Charon

"Close-up" of Styx

Pluto's "blue-skies" close-up

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

As first reported by spacebuff @dorsetknob in post #166 there is further news as to the future of New Horizons

Our target, 2014 MU69 (initially dubbed "PT1" for Potential Target 1), was found in 2014 by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a dedicated search for New Horizons KBO targets. Actually, HST found several potential targets, but this one was selected for several reasons. One is that it is the most accessible — New Horizons will need the least fuel and shortest flight time to reach it. But 2014 MU69 also hits the sweet spot scientifically. It's about 45 km across (assuming a 4% surface reflectivity), and it's a member of the "cold, classical" dynamical population of objects that formed right there in the Kuiper Belt directly from the primordial solar nebula. -

ollowing NASA's approval of 2014 MU69 in August, we began planning a series of trajectory adjustments so that New Horizons can get there. Those engine burns will take place between October 22nd and November 4th. The result of that will be a roughly 1,150-day flight of about a billion miles, culminating with an intercept on January 1, 2019, at a point 44.2 a.u. from the Sun. The flyby speed will be 14.4 km (8.9 miles) per second.

This flyby is contingent on NASA approving and funding a 4-year extension to the New Horizons mission — a decision planned for late summer 2016 (about when the last of our Pluto data reaches Earth). If that approval comes, then along the way to 2014 MU69 the spacecraft will also make observations of the heliosphere using our SWAP and PEPSSI plasma instruments, our dust impact counter, and our ultraviolet spectrograph.

We'll also be taking images of about 20 other KBOs that New Horizons will pass distantly. We won't see them resolved, but the resulting images will allow us to study how light reflects off their surfaces at varying Sun-object-camera angles — the kind of photometric studies of their surface properties that can't be made from Earth. We'll also use the spacecraft's camera to search more deeply for satellites around these KBOs than any Earth-based instrument or Hubble can do. These studies of small KBO surface properties and satellite populations will be a significant and completely unique contribution that only New Horizons can make.

Of course, the main science of the KBO mission, if funded, will be the flyby of 2014 MU69 itself. Our objectives for that flyby include:

• mapping the surface geology to learn how it formed and has evolved
• measuring the surface temperature
• mapping the 3D surface topography
• mapping the surface composition to learn how it is similar to and how it is different from comets like 67P and small planets like Pluto
• searching for any signs of activity, such as a cloud-like coma
• searching for (and studying any) satellites or rings
• measuring or constraining its mass

Astronomers don't yet know the exact shape of "PT1" (2014 MU69), but its estimated 45-km diameter is much larger than that of a typical comet.
NASA / JHU-APL / SWRI

Our team is already determining how close we can come to 2014 MU69. We hope to approach much closer than we did to Pluto, so that the imaging and spectral observations collected will have higher resolution than we obtained at Pluto. We also intend to employ all seven of the instruments aboard New Horizons. If the extended mission is approved, we'll build a much more detailed encounter observation plan in 2017 followed by development and testing the following year.

We expect New Horizons to begin making observations of 2014 MU69 in October 2018, beginning with satellite searches and navigation sightings to home in on the target. We won't see it resolved as a disk (or whatever shape it has) until the spacecraft begins its intensive operations just a few days before the encounter.

So mark January 1, 2019, on your long-range calendar. Although this flyby probably won't be as dramatic as the exploration of Pluto we just completed, it will be a record-setter for the most distant exploration of an object ever made. It will also be a KBO science bonanza — something we'll share with you and the world — that's unlikely to be repeated for decades.

- http://www.skyandtelescope.com/alanstern

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

Pluto science paper from New Horizons data highlights new mysteries
CBC NewsPosted: Oct 15, 2015 4:03 PM ET

Scientists have releasedmore published scientific results from July's historic flyby of Pluto and its moons, highlighting new discoveries and the new mysteries that have arisen with those discoveries.

A new paper published in Science today by the New Horizons team, led by principal investigator Alan Stern, summarizes what scientists have learned from data collected by the New Horizons spacecraft during the first-ever flyby of the dwarf planet and its moons on July 14.

• New Horizons spacecraft finds blue skies, frozen water on Pluto
• Pluto images show possible dunes, jumbled mountains

Here are 3 mysteries they highlight.

What's reshaping Pluto's surface?

Pluto's surface is covered in a range of features from mountains to plains, and different kinds of ice that range from bright and shiny to very dark red in colour.

Some areas appear to be shaped by glaciers and by ice that vapourizes in some areas and redeposits in others, especially on the plains near the planet's equator.

The formation of mountains and other geological reshaping seems to have happened recently, puzzling researchers.

"This raises questions of how such processes were powered so long after the formation of the Pluto system," they wrote.

They note that on most other icy bodies in the solar system – mostly moons — that kind of reshaping is powered by tides that make certain regions bulge and create heat from friction during the motion.

"But these are not a viable heat source today for Pluto or Charon," the researchers added.

The formation of mountains and other geological reshaping seems to have happened recently, puzzling researchers. 'This raises questions of how such processes were powered so long after the formation of the Pluto system,' they wrote. (NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)

What's that dark spot on Charon's north pole?

Pluto's largest moon, Charon, is mostly pale-coloured, but there's "puzzling dark terrain" on its north pole.

One possible explanation scientists have come up with is that during colder times, gases deposit there, then radiation chemically transforms them into coloured compounds called tholins that are heavier and less likely to vaporize during warmer times.

Pluto's largest moon, Charon, is mostly pale-coloured, but there's 'puzzling dark terrain' on its north pole. (NASA/Southwest Research Institute)


Why are Nix and Hydra so bright and shiny?

Measurements show that two of Pluto's moons, Nix and Hydra, are covered by the ice we're most familiar with – frozen water.

That ice is unexpectedly clean and bright.

"How such bright surfaces can be maintained on Nix and Hydra over billions of years is puzzling," the researchers wrote.

Billions of years of radiation and impacts from darker material such a meteorites should have made them turn darker and redder over time.

Another interesting discovery made by New Horizons but not mentioned in the new paper is that unlike Earth's moon – and likely most if not all other moons in the solar system – Nix and Hydra don't always face the same side toward Pluto.

"We now believe Nix and Hydra are spinning really fast and rotating in an odd way, and may be the only regular moons, meaning satellites that are near their host planets, which do not always point the same face toward their primary body," said Douglas Hamilton, a University of Maryland researcher who co-authored the new Science paper, in a statement.

That may be because of Pluto's largest moon Charon, which doesn't just orbit Pluto, but also has Pluto in its orbit, as a kind of "binary planet" system.

"It's possible that Nix and Hydra can't focus on locking one face toward Pluto because Charon keeps sweeping past and stirring things up."

Why is the sky blue?

New Horizons gave us more than a look at the surface of Pluto. Scientists were also interested in Pluto's atmosphere and the rate at which particles escape the globe’s weak gravitational pull. Pluto’s sky was revealed to be a familiar color, caused by red or gray particles which reflect a blue haze when touched by sunlight. The sun’s impact on the particles creates what are called tholins. When those tholins break up, they fall to the surface, leaving a red stain on the dwarf planet. Water ice also appears bright red, and this relationship remains a mystery.

(i told you Pluto was blue )

New Horizons is still in the process of sending data from its flyby back to Earth, a process that will take nearly another year.

Spoiler: pluto makes me smile

Just a little interesting one in case anyone has read this far

 

[R-T-B]

That's what I love about space. One question answered, 100 more revealed.