New Horizons flyby of Pluto [updated for Ultima Thule]

[Orodruin]

With some good will, the "heart" does looks a bit like a dog ...

 

[|Glitch|]

I hope New Horizons was able to collect more information on Pluto's other moons (other than Charon) as well. Could Pluto have more than 5 moons? When New Horizons was launched we only knew about the moons Charon, Nix, and Hydra. The moons Kerberos and Styx were not discovered until after New Horizons had been launched..

 

[DaveC426913]

More detailed images of Pluto reveal startling new features!

(You saw it here first, folks.)

 

[websterling]

The spacecraft phoned home- reported that it was in great health and no anomalies occurred during the fly-by!

 

[Astronuc]

Hello, Pluto! NASA Spacecraft Makes Historic Dwarf Planet Flyby
http://news.yahoo.com/hello-pluto-nasa- spacecraft -makes-historic-dwarf-planet-115557846.html

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

A pluto fly by recap would make a great Insight :)

 

[OmCheeto]

Chris Hadfield just mentioned that http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/tom0bio-1 's ashes are on the NH spacecraft .

I thought that was very cool.

 

[Drakkith]

Chris Hadfield just mentioned that http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/tom0bio-1 's ashes are on the NH spacecraft .

I thought that was very cool.

Geez, you'd think they would have wiped the spacecraft off prior to launch...

 

[Borg]

More detailed images of Pluto reveal startling new features!
View attachment 85953
(You saw it here first, folks.)

I'm sure it won't be the last.

 

[Dotini]

Just as we are getting used to the idea that Pluto is a lovable, laughable Disney cartoon, some other mythologists throw underworld demons from Lovecraft and Tolkien into the punchbowl! Lost Carcosa is how I'd like to name that crater with the central peak, located in NE Cthulhu not far from the peach-colored area. Maybe it's ruled by the Yellow King?

http://space.io9.com/places-on-pluto-are-being-named-for-your-darkest-imagin-1717825166

 

[Imager]

Quote from the article below, "New Horizons is collecting so much data it will take 16 months to send it all back to Earth." The good news, by then I will have paid off the mortgage on my house.

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20150714-4

 

[OmCheeto]

Just as we are getting used to the idea that Pluto is a lovable, laughable Disney cartoon, some other mythologists throw underworld demons from Lovecraft and Tolkien into the punchbowl! Lost Carcosa is how I'd like to name that crater with the central peak, located in NE Cthulhu not far from the peach-colored area. Maybe it's ruled by the Yellow King?

http://space.io9.com/places-on-pluto-are-being-named-for-your-darkest-imagin-1717825166

That "Vucub-Came" face looks just like something I saw last night on the Outer Limits.

Ahh!

http://www.hulu.com/watch/69739#i0,p104,d0

 

[Dotini]

New pix of Pluto and friends.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/...nasa_n_7803364.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592

Map of methane on Pluto.

Most detailed map yet of Pluto's biggest moon, Charon.

Close-up view of mountains on Pluto. There are no visible impact craters, NASA said, suggesting that the dwarf planet may be relatively young.

 

[Drakkith]

Wow, stunning pictures! And I'm sure the best is yet to come!

 

[|Glitch|]

The latest images from New Horizons:

New close-up images of a region near Pluto's equator reveal a giant surprise: a range of youthful mountains rising as high as 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) above the surface of the icy body.

The mountains likely formed no more than 100 million years ago -- mere youngsters relative to the 4.56-billion-year age of the solar system -- and may still be in the process of building. That suggests the close-up region, which covers less than one percent of Pluto's surface, may still be geologically active today.

The youthful age estimate is based on the lack of craters in this scene. Like the rest of Pluto, this region would presumably have been pummeled by space debris for billions of years and would have once been heavily cratered -- unless recent activity had given the region a facelift, erasing those pockmarks.

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 landscape.

The mountains are probably composed of Pluto's water-ice "bedrock." Although methane and nitrogen ice covers much of the surface of Pluto, these materials are not strong enough to build the mountains. Instead, a stiffer material, most likely water-ice, created the peaks.

The close-up image was taken about 1.5 hours before New Horizons closest approach to Pluto, when the craft was 47,800 miles (770,000 kilometers) from the surface of the planet. The image easily resolves structures smaller than a mile across.

Charon:

Remarkable new details of Pluto's largest moon Charon are revealed in this image from New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), taken late on July 13, 2015 from a distance of 289,000 miles (466,000 kilometers).

A swath of cliffs and troughs stretches about 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) from left to right, suggesting widespread fracturing of Charon's crust, likely a result of internal processes. At upper right, along the moon's curving edge, is a canyon estimated to be 4 to 6 miles (7 to 9 kilometers) deep.

Mission scientists are surprised by the apparent lack of craters on Charon. South of the moon's equator, at the bottom of this image, terrain is lit by the slanting rays of the sun, creating shadows that make it easier to distinguish topography. Even here, however, relatively few craters are visible, indicating a relatively young surface that has been reshaped by geologic activity.

In Charon's north polar region, a dark marking prominent in New Horizons' approach images is now seen to have a diffuse boundary, suggesting it is a thin deposit of dark material. Underlying it is a distinct, sharply bounded, angular feature; higher resolution images still to come are expected to shed more light on this enigmatic region.

The image has been compressed to reduce its file size for transmission to Earth. In high-contrast areas of the image, features as small as 3 miles (5 kilometers) across can be seen. Some lower-contrast detail is obscured by the compression of the image, which may make some areas appear smoother than they really are. The uncompressed version still resides in New Horizons' computer memory and is scheduled to be transmitted at a later date.

 

[Dotini]

The observations were made at three wavelengths of infrared light, which are invisible to the human eye. In this picture, blue corresponds to light of wavelengths 1.62 to 1.70 micrometers, a channel covering a medium-strong absorption band of methane ice, green (1.97 to 2.05 micrometers) represents a channel where methane ice does not absorb light, and red (2.30 to 2.33 micrometers) is a channel where the light is very heavily absorbed by methane ice. The two areas outlined on Pluto show where Ralph observations obtained the spectral traces at the right. Note that the methane absorptions (notable dips) in the spectrum from the northern region are much deeper than the dips in the spectrum from the dark patch.
https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/pluto-the-ice-plot-thickens

 

[Astronuc]

Mission scientists are surprised by the apparent lack of craters on Charon.

Nevertheless, I see craters on Charon, but not on Pluto. Could it be that having a surface of mostly water (H₂O), nitrogen (ammonia?), methane and CO/CO₂, that the kinetic energy of a collision would melt the surface and the liquid phase would then flow back into any cavity and then refreeze, so no craters. It would be interesting to simulate the collision process.

Perhaps Charon is more rocky, so craters are preserved.

http://news.yahoo.com/us- spacecraft -survives-close-encounter-pluto-010017319.html

Fascinating!

 

[newjerseyrunner]

Could it's smooth surface be explained by millions of years of it's atmosphere sublimating and resolidifying each orbit? Wouldn't the atmosphere would fall like snow and it wouldn't do so evenly across the surface. Could nitrogen/methane glaciers moving about every 250 years polish the surface like that?

My first impression of the pic of Charon was how much I thought it resembled a giant snowball.

Gorgeous little dwarf planet.

 

[OmCheeto]

I know I'm cross-threading, but today I learned what "pareidolla" means.

xkcd's explanation of what we are seeing on Pluto

 

[Astronuc]

Interesting story and insights
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-.../nasa-zooms-in-on-pluto-for-closest-views-yet

I heard an interview with a scientist, Alan Stern, from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) today on NPR. We're changing our understanding of planets based on our closeup observations of Pluto. It was previously understood that there would be no activity on the frozen planets, yet there is. Nitrogen is a weak material, unable to form a solid like water.

http://www.opb.org/news/article/npr-new-horizons-mission-leader-explains-plutos-ice-mountains-and-more/
On the team’s biggest discovery about Pluto (so far)

“Let me emphasize that we have very little data back, so I don’t know that this will be the biggest discovery. But it is a big discovery. We discovered that Pluto and its moon Charon are still geologically active after all this time, after 4-plus billion years since they were born. That really changes some very deep-seated concepts in planetary science, because the small planets are expected to cool off in much less time than that, so they shouldn’t have an energy budget that allows them to drive active geology after so much time. So our discovery, which flies in the face of that, will cause a big rethink of how planetary engines work.”

Discoveries about Pluto’s surface

“When we look at Pluto’s surface, and measure it’s composition, which we’ve been able to do from the Earth and from Earth orbit with instruments like the Hubble [Space Telescope], we know that the surface composition is dominated by snows of nitrogen. And it’s the same stuff we’re breathing right now in the air, but on Pluto, it’s frozen as a snow on the surface. And the thing about nitrogen is that it’s a very weak material, so just like sand or other things that we could think of as examples of weak, if you try to pile it up in a big mountain, it’ll just collapse or slump under its own weight. So you can’t have nitrogen mountains.

So perhaps, a planet can have a relatively smooth, craterless surface.

With New Horizons, all that has changed. Scientists can now see craters and regions of dark-reddish ground. A large, white, heart-shaped feature on the equator is made of ice, though Pluto is so cold it's probably an ice of nitrogen or methane, rather than water.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-...e-of-our-solar-system-finally-come-into-focus

http://www.swri.org/9what/releases/2015/pluto-discoveries-mountains-moons.htm

 

[rootone]

Great result, and still 16 months before we have the full data.
One thing about Pluto (and companions) that I don't yet know an explanation for is,
why is the orbit way adrift of the plane in which all the other planet(oids) are in?
Some 17 degrees out of the usual plane, and not only that, it has a highly non circular orbit so that sometimes is closer to the Sin than Neptune is.

Ideas?

 

[|Glitch|]

Great result, and still 16 months before we have the full data.
One thing about Pluto (and companions) that I don't yet know an explanation for is,
why is the orbit way adrift of the plane in which all the other planet(oids) are in?
Some 17 degrees out of the usual plane, and not only that, it has a highly non circular orbit so that sometimes is closer to the Sin than Neptune is.

Ideas?

I think the most obvious idea is that Pluto's current orbit was the result of some massive collision. Possibly with Triton, Neptune's moon. It could also explain why Triton is the only moon in the solar system with a retrograde orbit. Several papers have suggested a large impact with Pluto in order to create its smaller low-mass moons. Some even suggest that there could be a ring system around Pluto outside the orbit of Pluto's moon Hydra.

Formation and evolution of Pluto's small satellites - arXiv : 1505.01208
Evolution of a ring around the Pluto-Charon binary - arXiv : 1503.06805
The Formation of Pluto's Low Mass Satellites - arXiv : 1303.0280
Are there rings around Pluto? - arXiv : 1109.1614 [PDF]

 

[Dotini]

Frozen plains of Pluto--vast and craterless. Similar surfaces can be seen on glaciers here on Earth.

“We know the atmosphere is nitrogen,” New Horizons co-investigator Fran Bagenal, said of Pluto. Pluto has a tail of charged particles.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...79be4b0c5f0322d155e?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592

 

[megacal]

"... that the kinetic energy of a collision would melt the surface and the liquid phase would then flow back into any cavity and then refreeze, so no craters. It would be interesting to simulate the collision process...
Fascinating!

I agree! I was just speculating on that in the Modo forum.

"They say they didn't see any impact craters, but what could explain all those roundish, hexagonal
features?
Maybe a meteorite hit, broke through the crust to the ice below, then re-froze, leaving a
pseudo-crater?
Maybe they are already testing that theory using the super pellet gun
they showed in the NOVA show, Chasing Pluto, vs an ice ball covered with a relatively thin coating of , e.g.
cement? See if it creates those features after impact and re-freezing(?)"​

The "gun" is mounted horizontally, but imagine it would need to shoot veritcally/down at any Pluto-like target in 56k environment.

Sounds like a fun experiment.

 

[DennisN]

Wow, stunning pictures! And I'm sure the best is yet to come!

I second that! Very nice to see Charon above, and the close-up of Pluto... I am truly affected by seeing these nice images!

 

[Astronuc]

I agree! I was just speculating on that in the Modo forum.

"They say they didn't see any impact craters, but what could explain all those roundish, hexagonal
features?
Maybe a meteorite hit, broke through the crust to the ice below, then re-froze, leaving a
pseudo-crater?
Maybe they are already testing that theory using the super pellet gun
they showed in the NOVA show, Chasing Pluto, vs an ice ball covered with a relatively thin coating of , e.g.
cement? See if it creates those features after impact and re-freezing(?)"​

The "gun" is mounted horizontally, but imagine it would need to shoot veritcally/down at any Pluto-like target in 56k environment.

Sounds like a fun experiment.

Well, since I speculated on that, we learned that nitrogen is a rather weak substance in the solid state, so if Pluto is rich in nitrogen (and perhaps some ammonia), then perhaps the nitrogen flows back into the craters.

See my later post - https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/new-horizons-flyby-of-pluto.821560/page-4#post-5170792
Discoveries about Pluto’s surface

 

[rootone]

Nitrogen snowdrifts burying impact craters.
Apparently some sort of tectonic activity too.
Weird but maybe explainable orbit of the Sun.
Composition as known so far does not resemble Neptune, the only really serious planet somewhere nearby.
mmm - this can only get more interesting,

 

[OmCheeto]

I'm not saying it's aliens.

but... Pluto sure looks like brains to me. hmmmm...

Ack!​

 

[DennisN]

New Horizons Close-Up of Charon’s ‘Mountain in a Moat’:
(Source: http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/new-horizons-close-up-of-charon-s-mountain-in-a-moat)

 

[Garth]

Charon has more craters than Pluto which is surprisingly short of them. I would surmise that this is because Pluto has been able to retain more of an nitrogen atmosphere that locally freezes in the 'winter' filling in any expressions. The gas then only partially sublimes when 'summer' arrives.

Garth

 

[|Glitch|]

Nitrogen snowdrifts burying impact craters.
Apparently some sort of tectonic activity too.
Weird but maybe explainable orbit of the Sun.
Composition as known so far does not resemble Neptune, the only really serious planet somewhere nearby.
mmm - this can only get more interesting,

While Pluto does not resemble Neptune, it does resemble one of Neptune's moons in regard to its composition - Triton.

 

[Borg]

Today's APOD is a composition of several flyovers.

 

[Garth]

Fantastic! You can see what looks like craters under the nitrogen snow in the 'Sputnik Planum' flyover.

Garth

 

[Monsterboy]

Great result, and still 16 months before we have the full data.
One thing about Pluto (and companions) that I don't yet know an explanation for is,
why is the orbit way adrift of the plane in which all the other planet(oids) are in?
Some 17 degrees out of the usual plane, and not only that, it has a highly non circular orbit so that sometimes is closer to the Sin than Neptune is.

Ideas?

Michio kaku once said Pluto is an over grown comet , comets don't revolve in the same plane as planets right ?

 

[Dotini]

Michio kaku once said Pluto is an over grown comet , comets don't revolve in the same plane as planets right ?

Did he really say that?

Like a comet, Pluto is on an inclined, elliptical orbit, shows activity, has a sort of a coma, tail of charged particles and a magnetic field. Today there is some blurring between asteroids, comets, planetesimals, et al. But in this age of discovery, some confusion is probably to be expected.

 

[Janus]

Charon has more craters than Pluto which is surprisingly short of them. I would surmise that this is because Pluto has been able to retain more of an nitrogen atmosphere that locally freezes in the 'winter' filling in any expressions. The gas then only partially sublimes when 'summer' arrives.

Garth

But wouldn't that fill in any other surface irregularities? It's not like the surface is completely smooth, there are hills and channels; none of which look particularly "smoothed out". And what about the really big craters? would it be enough to fill them in? The pictures showing tall mountains seems to indicate otherwise. They seem to show that any layer of nitrogen snow must be relatively thin.

I think someone else suggested that the impacting object could melt the surrounding ice which would then flow back to fill in the crater. But wouldn't that leave circularly shaped "flat smooth spots", like circular frozen lakes? So far none of the pictures I've seen show this. I think we are stuck with recent geological processes erasing craters. ( or may I suggest "hadeological" processes? Since no one has considered such a possibility before, I doubt that they've coined a name for it yet.)

 

[Garth]

But wouldn't that fill in any other surface irregularities? It's not like the surface is completely smooth, there are hills and channels; none of which look particularly "smoothed out". And what about the really big craters? would it be enough to fill them in? The pictures showing tall mountains seems to indicate otherwise. They seem to show that any layer of nitrogen snow must be relatively thin.

I think someone else suggested that the impacting object could melt the surrounding ice which would then flow back to fill in the crater. But wouldn't that leave circularly shaped "flat smooth spots", like circular frozen lakes? So far none of the pictures I've seen show this. I think we are stuck with recent geological processes erasing craters. ( or may I suggest "hadeological" processes? Since no one has considered such a possibility before, I doubt that they've coined a name for it yet.)

Well the way I see it Sputnik Planum being very light coloured looks like a relatively new (nitrogen) snow field on top of the normal surface, which may well be made of other types of ice and/or rock. Old ice tends to be dirty as it collects interplanetary dust such as on the surface of comets.

Garth

 

[Chronos]

I tend to agree some combination of geolophysical activities are probably necessary to explain the paucity of cratering on pluto. I expected Pluto to look more like the moon or mercury given what we thought we knew of it. There can be little doubt pluto orbits in an impact rich environment so the absence of prolific cratering is very surprising. The same may be true for Charon, which also looks oddly smooth to me.

 

[Monsterboy]

Did he really say that?

Like a comet, Pluto is on an inclined, elliptical orbit, shows activity, has a sort of a coma, tail of charged particles and a magnetic field. Today there is some blurring between asteroids, comets, planetesimals, et al. But in this age of discovery, some confusion is probably to be expected.

Yes he did say that and yea it has a lot of characteristics of a comet , highly elliptical and inclined orbit , takes a long time to complete a revolution , it grows a tail when it is closer to the sun etc etc

 

[Lord Crc]

This bloke over at unmannedspaceflight.com made a composite image, pretty cool:

Source: http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=7986&st=1005&p=224392&#entry224392

 

[DennisN]

NASA’s New Horizons Finds Second Mountain Range in Pluto’s ‘Heart’ (source: here)

This newest image further illustrates the remarkably well-defined topography along the western edge of Tombaugh Regio.

“There is a pronounced difference in texture between the younger, frozen plains to the east and the dark, heavily-cratered terrain to the west,” said Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team (GGI) at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. “There’s a complex interaction going on between the bright and the dark materials that we’re still trying to understand.”

While Sputnik Planum is believed to be relatively young in geological terms – perhaps less than 100 million years old - the darker region probably dates back billions of years. Moore notes that the bright, sediment-like material appears to be filling in old craters (for example, the bright circular feature to the lower left of center).

 

[Dotini]

"...a catastrophic impact between what are now Pluto and Charon could have created a subsurface ocean. That ocean could be the driving force behind icy tectonics, an idea explored by planetary geophysicists http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Amy_Barr_Mlinar and http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Geoffrey_Collins in a paper published last year."

Enceladus has a ridiculously hot pole, and we still can’t explain why. Image credit: NASA
http://space.io9.com/could-a-massive-collision-produce-a-subsurface-ocean-on-1719439790

 

[rootone]

NASA released some new images today.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/gallery/2015/jul/24/pluto-news-nasa-photographs

 

[DaveC426913]

Wait! That's not a heart!

Spoiler: Oh NOOZZ! It's...

PLANET X!

 

[OmCheeto]

NASA released some new images today.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/gallery/2015/jul/24/pluto-news-nasa-photographs

Umm... In the future, could you please describe such things as:

"OH MY FREAKIN' GOD! NASA RELEASED SOME FREAKIN' AWESOME PICTURES TODAY!"

Thanks!

 

[diogenesNY]

Wait! That's not a heart!

"Oh NOOZZ! It's..."] [deleted spoiler content] !

So, does this mean that we have discovered the source of the _Shaving Cream Atom_?
:)

diogenesNY

 

[B1948J]

But you can! I've given you everything you need to know about the imaging system to do so. (I think I have at least)

Yes Drakkith, I think all that would be useful if one knew the exact time and date of the photo, could calculate the orbits and trajectories of Pluto and Charon and knew the spatial positioning between the two and New Horizons. Since Charon and Pluto orbit each other in binary fashion and New Horizons could be at just about any angle to the two, I'm thinking it's probably not a mental calculation. ;) The common-sense answers provided within this thread provided me with my "duh!" moments - especially the one about crashing into Pluto at 36,000 mph.

 

[DennisN]

Some more eye candy/maps (for some reason I could not post any thumbnail images in most of the cases, so you have to click on the links to see the images):

• http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Multimedia/Science-Photos/image.php?gallery_id=2&image_id=254
• http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Multimedia/Science-Photos/image.php?gallery_id=2&image_id=252
• Global Map of Pluto's Moon Charon
• Informal Names for Features on Pluto*
• Informal Names for Features on Pluto’s Sputnik Planum*
  
• Informal Names for Features on Pluto’s Moon Charon*

* From the http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Multimedia/Images/index.php: "Names have not yet been approved by the International Astronomical Union (IAU)".

• PIA19697: The 'Other' Red Planet (Animation), source: here.

Edit: I don't remember seeing this one before in the thread:

• 'Capturing' Nix and Hydra (moons of Pluto)

 

[DennisN]

Not Pluto, but beyond...far beyond...
NASA’s New Horizons Team Selects Potential Kuiper Belt Flyby Target (NASA)

NASA has selected the potential next destination for the New Horizons mission to visit after its historic July 14 flyby of the Pluto system. The destination is a small Kuiper Belt object (KBO) known as 2014 MU69 that orbits nearly a billion miles beyond Pluto.

 

[nsaspook]

High-res images are starting to come in and be released.

http://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-pluto-images-from-nasa-s-new-horizons-it-s-complicated