Daily Archives: July 8, 2015

New Horizons mission, Pluto

Pluto’s On the Map!

Leave a comment

Meet the Whale and the Donut

The Pluto map from the New Horizons LORRI instrument. The darkest material lies along Pluto's equator. The dark region on the left is called "the whale".Courtesy NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI.
The Pluto map from the New Horizons LORRI instrument. The darkest material lies along Pluto’s equator. The dark region on the left is called “the whale”. The rounded feature on its tail is called the “donut”. Courtesy NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI.

The hits just keep on coming from New Horizons, showing us more detailed images and now a map of the distant world’s surface. This shows surface reflectance (that is, the variations in reflection of sunlight by material on the surface), combined with color information.  The dark areas could be organic-rich ice that has been darkened by sunlight, while the bright regions seem to show “fresher” ice made of methane or nitrogen, and possibly even carbon dioxide. The brighter areas don’t appear to have been darkened quite so much. Or, maybe there’s something else going on here, something we’ll hear more about as the team gets more images and spectral science from the spacecraft over the next week or so. (Like, how does “fresher” ice get to the surface?)

You can see a whale-shaped region at the lower left (which is really along the equatorial region), and a heart-shaped region to its right that the whale appears to be swimming into. The dark region just above the whale has a brighter spot in it; that’s the pole of the planet.

What intrigues me even more are the mottled regions in the right half of the map. What’s going on there?  And, why is there a “donut”-shaped region on the far left, about where the whale’s tail is? I’m sure we’ll be getting more insight into these regions and what shapes them as more high-resolution images come streaming in. Luckily, we aren’t going to have to wait very long!

The View’s Improving as New Horizons Gets Closer

A New Horizons LORRI imager vew of Pluto from a distance of 8 million kilometers (about 5 million miles) from Pluto. Courtesy NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI
A New Horizons LORRI imager vew of Pluto from a distance of 8 million kilometers (about 5 million miles) from Pluto. Courtesy NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI

The views will get better as the days go by and higher-resolution images keep truckin’ in from deep space. What amazed me (and maybe it shouldn’t, given how responsive the team is to media and public interest) is that New Horizons sent an image taken yesterday after it went back into normal mode and commenced the flyby mission plan. And, the team turned it right around and got it out to us today. Again, you can make out the whale lower left along the equator, plus the heart-shaped region to its right.

This is also the view that New Horizons will mainly see as it sweeps past next Tuesday, July 14th. However, as it gets closer, we’ll be seeing better and better images.  As Alan Stern has pointed out more than a few times, it’ll be as sharp as being in orbit around Earth and using a high-powered camera to pick out details in Central Park in New York City.

Want to follow along as the mission progresses? NASA just released a timeline for media coverage of the flyby events. If you have access to NASA TV (and maybe, just MAYBE there will be some live coverage by some of the mainstream media), check out the timeline here and get more information about the  mission here and here.