The Orbital Mechanics highlighted how little we know about planetary formation, so let’s talk about Pluto and what we’ve learned from the New Horizons Mission.
Officially a dwarf planet in the Kuiper beltAbout 0.18 the radius of EarthMass 0.178 of the moon’sVery low densityGravity 0.63 gNeptune and Pluto were both predicted to exist from orbital perturbations of UranusPercival Lowell (founder of Lowell observatory) started the hunt for pluto in 1906.Tombaugh found Pluto using a blink comparison techniqueMoons of PlutoOrbit is chaotic, we can predict forwards and backwards for several million years, but over the Lyapunov time we have no idea.New Horizons Wiki PageLaunched January 20, 2006Fly-by July 14, 2015Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI)Solar Wind At Pluto (SWAP)Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation (PEPSSI)Alice (UV imaging spectrometer)Ralph telescopeVenetia Burney Student Dust Counter (VBSDC)Radio Science Experiment (REX)July 4, 2015 the software went into safe modeTurned out to be a flaw in the timing of the commands in the fly-by prep software.Full functionality restored July 79 hour round trip radio delayBright heart shape observed on the side of the planet during approach is ice (Tombaugh Regio)Nitrogen ice flows like glaciers on Earth. Water ice is very brittle at surface conditions –390 F (–234 C)Active surface is exciting, it’s not a dead planet!Glacier Like Flows News Article from ScienceAs UV light from the sun strikes the thin atmosphere, eventually making tholins that color the surface of the planetSome particles remain suspended, shouldn’t be over 30 km (20 mi) off the sfc.Particles were found to be up to 130 km (81 mi) above the surfaceAtmospheric pressure is droppingSpace.com ArticleJust as geologically exciting as PlutoLikely atmospheric in origin, but could still be geologicLow gravity of Pluto means it won’t hold onto its atmosphere…and Charon is near its same size, so it can pick up gravitationally what Pluto is putting down.Red coating could take less than a million years to formScience Magazine ArticleTeam opened the image file, but it was of Charon. They momentarily freaked wondering if the spacecraft wasn’t in the right position.Ended up that they were looking in the wrong directory on a FTP server.2 months of particle and plasma instrument gatheringWill choose between two Kuiper belt objects and head that way to meet in 2019Data transmission home for about 16 monthsTops out about 1 kilobit per second on the 70 m dishes of the deep space networkCan double the rate using different polarization transmissions from the two amps “twittas”, but something else must be shut down to have enough power to run both at the same timeSuper Planet Crash APODPluto time tool shows you when your lighting matches that on Pluto. Tweet your photos to us and NASA!Article Announcing Haze and Ice FlowsThis week’s fun paper sounds a little bit like Jurassic Park to us. What do you think? Blood vessels recovered from fossils.
Schweitzer, Mary H., et al. “Soft-tissue vessels and cellular preservation in Tyrannosaurus rex.” Science 307.5717 (2005): 1952–1955.
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