New Horizons Pluto Flyby

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Backlit by the sun, Pluto’s atmosphere rings its silhouette like a luminous halo in this image taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft around midnight EDT on July 15. This global portrait of the atmosphere was captured when the spacecraft was about 1.25 million miles (2 million kilometers) from Pluto and shows structures as small as 12 miles across. The image, delivered to Earth on July 23, is displayed with north at the top of the frame.
Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Flowing ice and a surprising extended haze are among the newest discoveries from NASA’s New Horizons mission, which reveal distant Pluto to be an icy world of wonders.

“We knew that a mission to Pluto would bring some surprises, and now -- 10 days after closest approach -- we can say that our expectation has been more than surpassed,” said John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate. “With flowing ices, exotic surface chemistry, mountain ranges, and vast haze, Pluto is showing a diversity of planetary geology that is truly thrilling."

Just seven hours after closest approach, New Horizons aimed its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) back at Pluto, capturing sunlight streaming through the atmosphere and revealing hazes as high as 80 miles (130 kilometers) above Pluto’s surface. A preliminary analysis of the image shows two distinct layers of haze -- one about 50 miles (80 kilometers) above the surface and the other at an altitude of about 30 miles (50 kilometers).

“My jaw was on the ground when I saw this first image of an alien atmosphere in the Kuiper Belt,” said Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. “It reminds us that exploration brings us more than just incredible discoveries -- it brings incredible beauty.”

Studying Pluto’s atmosphere provides clues as to what’s happening below.

“The hazes detected in this image are a key element in creating the complex hydrocarbon compounds that give Pluto’s surface its reddish hue,” said Michael Summers, New Horizons co-investigator at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

Models suggest the hazes form when ultraviolet sunlight breaks up methane gas particles -- a simple hydrocarbon in Pluto’s atmosphere. The breakdown of methane triggers the buildup of more complex hydrocarbon gases, such as ethylene and acetylene, which also were discovered in Pluto’s atmosphere by New Horizons. As these hydrocarbons fall to the lower, colder parts of the atmosphere, they condense into ice particles that create the hazes. Ultraviolent sunlight chemically converts hazes into tholins, the dark hydrocarbons that color Pluto’s surface.

Scientists previously had calculated temperatures would be too warm for hazes to form at altitudes higher than 20 miles (30 kilometers) above Pluto’s surface.

“We’re going to need some new ideas to figure out what’s going on,” said Summers.

The New Horizons mission also found in LORRI images evidence of exotic ices flowing across Pluto’s surface and revealing signs of recent geologic activity, something scientists hoped to find but didn’t expect.

The new images show fascinating details within the Texas-sized plain, informally named Sputnik Planum, which lies within the western half of Pluto’s heart-shaped feature, known as Tombaugh Regio. There, a sheet of ice clearly appears to have flowed -- and may still be flowing -- in a manner similar to glaciers on Earth.

“We’ve only seen surfaces like this on active worlds like Earth and Mars,” said mission co-investigator John Spencer of SwRI. “I'm really smiling.”

Additionally, new compositional data from New Horizons’ Ralph instrument indicate the center of Sputnik Planum is rich in nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and methane ices.

“At Pluto’s temperatures of minus-390 degrees Fahrenheit, these ices can flow like a glacier,” said Bill McKinnon, deputy leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team at Washington University in St. Louis. “In the southernmost region of the heart, adjacent to the dark equatorial region, it appears that ancient, heavily-cratered terrain has been invaded by much newer icy deposits.”

View a simulated flyover using New Horizons’ close-approach images of Sputnik Planum and Pluto’s newly-discovered mountain range, informally named Hillary Montes, in the video below:

http://go.nasa.gov/1MMEdTb

The New Horizons mission will continue to send data stored in its onboard recorders back to Earth through late 2016. The spacecraft currently is 7.6 million miles (12.2 million kilometers) beyond Pluto, healthy and flying deeper into the Kuiper Belt.

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, designed, built, and operates the New Horizons spacecraft, and manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. SwRI, based in San Antonio, leads the science team, payload operations and encounter science planning. New Horizons is part of the New Frontiers Program managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

For more information on the New Horizons mission, including fact sheets, schedules, video and images, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons

 

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Fake!

 

[Zyraz]

NEW HORIZONS SHOWS A HIDDEN OCEAN BENEATH PLUTO’S ICY SURFACE


New Horizons shows Hidden Ocean beneath Pluto’s Icy Exterior

The New Horizons spacecraft showed a hidden ocean beneath Pluto’s icy exterior.
The information that was sent to earth by the New Horizons spacecraft regarding Pluto has been analyzed in depth. Pluto has a rock-like core that resembles the one possessed by our own planet earth.

It is covered by a mantle that consists of water ice. This in turn is surrounded by methane, carbon monoxide and nitrogen. All of these constituents tend to undergo sublimation, precipitation and flowing movements on the surface of Pluto.

Pluto held a world of wonders for the Space Horizons probe. Since the past eight months as the spacecraft undertook a flyby close to the last planet of the solar system, a steady stream of data has been forthcoming from the pics it has taken of Pluto.

The surface and climate of Pluto have really got the astronomers in a tizzy. These two entities are both tempestuous and show diversity. This is so despite the average temperature being ten degrees above absolute zero.

The expectations of most scientists have been proven wrong. Despite being quite a cold world, Pluto is not without its physico-chemical activities which are plentiful in nature.

Actually, nitrogen glaciers enter plains of frozen methane on Pluto. As for the mountains, they are made of water ice. After spending nearly 10 years and covering a distance of 3 billion miles, New Horizons reached Pluto.

The trip was worthwhile seeing the amount of novel data that was gathered by the probe. During a week and a half of the encounter with Pluto, the probe gathered 50 gigabits of data regarding the new world.

The initial pics showed a large heart-shaped feature smack in the center of Pluto’s landscape. It is an intriguing and enigmatic world.

Pluto and Charon have been studied up close and personal by now. This observational exercise has yielded a ton of information that will go on to fill in the gaps in our knowledge about the universe we inhabit.

The Kuiper Belt’s formation is also a question that will be answered soon thanks to the probe’s examination of the far pavilions of space. The evaporation and condensation patterns on the planet are simply mindboggling in their complexity.

According to TechTimes, these cycles of water ice are a lot more deeper than are to be found on earth. Pluto’s atmosphere is yet to be fully deciphered though.

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[Zyraz]

Multitasking New Horizons observed solar wind changes on journey to Pluto

San Antonio — April 5, 2016 — In addition to its history-making encounter with Pluto last July, the New Horizons spacecraft also recorded significant changes in how the solar wind behaves far from the Sun.

The Solar Wind Around Pluto (SWAP) instrument, operated by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), collected three years' worth of measurements before the July 15 Pluto flyby. Data showed that the tumultuous flow of solar particles, which in the inner solar system is structured by the interaction of fast and slow flows as well as eruptive events on the Sun, becomes more uniform by the time the solar wind has traversed the 3 billion miles to Pluto's orbit.

SWAP measures the solar wind and ions created as the neutral interstellar material becomes ionized and is "picked up" by the solar wind. These interstellar pickup ions can have up to twice the speed and four times the energy of the solar wind. Farther out in space, these ions may be the seeds of the extremely fast energetic particles called anomalous cosmic rays, which pose a radiation threat to astronauts closer to Earth. These ions also play an important role in shaping the boundary where the solar wind hits interstellar space. New Horizons is currently at about 35 astronomical units (about 35 times farther than the Earth to the Sun). It is the only operating spacecraft in the outer solar system. Only Voyager 2 has measured the solar wind farther away from the Sun; however, SWAP on New Horizons will be the first to measure the interstellar pickup ions in the outer solar system.

The results will appear in a study to be published April 6 by the Astrophysical Journal Supplement.

Lead author Dr. Heather Elliott, a principal scientist in SwRI's Space Science and Engineering Division, said the SWAP instrument was busy even when the rest of New Horizon's instruments were "hibernating" to save energy on the long, nine-year voyage to Pluto.

"The instrument was only scheduled to power on for annual checkouts after the Jupiter flyby in 2007," she said. "We came up with a plan to keep the particle instruments on during the cruise phase while the rest of the spacecraft was hibernating. We started observing in 2012."

The plan yielded three years of near-continuous observations, capturing detailed measurements of the space environment in a region few spacecraft have ever visited.

Because the Sun is the source of the solar wind, events on the Sun are the primary force that shapes the space environment. Shocks in the solar wind — which can produce space weather, such as auroras, on worlds with magnetic fields — are created either by fast, dense clouds of material called coronal mass ejections or by the collision of two different-speed solar wind streams. These individual features are easily observed in the inner solar system, but New Horizons didn't see the same level of detail.

"At this distance, the scale size of discernible solar wind structures increases, since smaller structures are worn down or merge together," said Elliott. "It's hard to predict if the interaction between smaller structures will create a bigger structure, or if they will flatten out completely."

Subtler signs of the Sun's influence are also harder to spot in the outer solar system. Characteristics of the solar wind — speed, density, and temperature — are shaped by the region of the Sun it flows from. As the Sun and its different wind-producing regions rotate, patterns form. New Horizons didn't see patterns as defined as they are when closer to the Sun, but it nevertheless did spot some structure.

"Differences in speed and density average together as the solar wind moves out," said Elliott. "But the wind is still being heated as it travels and faster wind runs into slower wind, so you see evidence of the Sun's rotation pattern in the temperatures even in the outer solar system."

New Horizons is the first mission in NASA's New Frontiers program, managed by the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory designed, built, and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission under Principal Investigator Dr. Alan Stern's direction for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. SwRI leads the science mission, payload operations, and encounter science planning. The NASA Heliophysics program also supported the analysis of these observations.

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Editors: For more information, see http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard...s-fills-gap-in-space-environment-observations.

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The craters in images taken by New Horizons have provided insight into the Kuiper Belt:

Using New Horizons data from the Pluto-Charon flyby in 2015, a Southwest Research Institute-led team of scientists have indirectly discovered a distinct and surprising lack of very small objects in the Kuiper Belt. The evidence for the paucity of small Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) comes from New Horizons imaging that revealed a dearth of small craters on Pluto's largest satellite, Charon, indicating that impactors from 300 feet to 1 mile (91 meters to 1.6 km) in diameter must also be rare.

"This surprising lack of small KBOs changes our view of the Kuiper Belt and shows that either its formation or evolution, or both, were somewhat different than those of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter," said Singer. "Perhaps the asteroid belt has more small bodies than the Kuiper Belt because its population experiences more collisions that break up larger objects into smaller ones."