BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy Pluto - it's a whole new story now

Nasa has chosen the next target for New Horizons, now that it's completed its flyby of Pluto. The team – with the assistance of the Hubble Space Telescope – have spent quite some time looking for suitable targets. The one they've chosen is 2014 MU69, which was discovered last year by the HST in a preliminary survey to find another Kuiper Belt object to visit.

Things are pretty spread out in the Kuiper Belt and it would be over three years before New Horizons encounters 2014 MU69. It's about a billion and a half km away from Pluto.

More Pluto pictures are making their way home starting today. It will take more than a year to get it all back. The average downlink rate will be around 1-4 kilobits per second, which is less than 10% of the speed for most computer modems. Remember that New Horizons doesn't generate much power and it takes over four and a half hours for transmissions to reach us, even at light speed.

Every Friday new images (unprocessed) from the LOng Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) will be added here.

Here are yesterday's New Horizons photo releases. They're high-res images stored on the probe's hard drive from its July fly-by of Pluto. And they're now being slowly downlinked from New Horizons to Earth where NASA's Deep Space Network is collecting the data.

The first one is made up of several images to cover an area about 1800 km (1100 miles) across. The bottom is Cthulhu Regio, an old surface scarred with craters. Above is the Sputnik Planum, a smooth surface borken into mysterious polygons. (BTW all of the place names are still considered informal, as they haven't been officially sanctioned by the International Astronomical Union.)

High-res images of Charon taken during the New Horizons July 14 flyby have recently arrived home. They show a system of fractures extending four times the length of the Grand Canyon around Charon's midsection. Furthermore the scientists think that it continues around onto the moon's far side. The detail visible in these images suggests that the the system may be something like the East African Rift or the Martian Valles Marinaris, where the crust has been split open.

The picture also shows a flat plain (provisionally named Vulcan Planum). Since it has far fewer impact craters than elsewhere, it must be considerably younger than other regions. It's possibly been caused by cryovolcanism, i.e., cold watery liquid gushing out from the interior – like lava from an earthly volcano – and flowing over the surface.

The Charon images from New Horizons were used to make a short (20 seconds!) flyover video . It starts with a dark region near the north pole, informally named Mordor. Then it's south over the chasm where it dips down to just 60 km (40 miles) above the surface to fly through the canyon system. Finally there's a view of Kubrick Mons, a mountain that looks as though it has a moat around it.

Not only does Pluto's moon Charon have a massive crack through its crust, it has a strange red depression at the north pole. Most of the reddish area is enclosed by a high basin rim. Perhaps the reddish material came from the moon's interior? Or it may be some chemistry at work, consisting of organic compounds made from methane that escaped from Pluto. A mystery.

Who'd have expected anything on Pluto to have any similarities to Earth? But from the July fly-by data, the New Horizons team has discovered that Pluto's sky is blue and that there are patches of water ice on the surface. To produce this image of Pluto, color data was processed to match the way the human eye sees color. And the skies were blue! Gorgeous – my favorite color.

Although there's been evidence in the past of frozen nitrogen, carbon monoxide and methane on Pluto, recent New Horizons pictures are the first to show that part of the surface of Pluto is covered in water ice.

Whatever next?!

New Horizons has carried out two successful maneuvers of the four needed in order to head towards its new target 2014 MU69. The craft is still transmitting data from the July Pluto flyby while traveling at some 52,000 km/hr (32,000 mph). It's over five billion km/three billion miles) from Earth now and its encounter with 2014 MU69 should happen at the end of December 2018.

Sky & Telescope magazine asked Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator, what had been the 10 most surprising discoveries so far. Nine of the ten he named were things they'd found, but surprisingly, the tenth was something they didn't discover. They didn't discover any new moons for Pluto.

Stern said,

Hi Mona,

Do you think Pluto will ever regain its status as a planet?

Maybe it should approach some equal opportunities tribunal and complain?

It's a serious question ...

Cheers now