Monthly Archives: July 2015

astronomy, exploration, Science

The Stars and Planets Ignite Our Dreams

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And Make Us Think About What is Possible

A visible light image of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex. Courtesy of NASKIES, CC-BY-SA-3.0
A visible light image of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex. Courtesy of NASKIES, CC-BY-SA-3.0

What price do you put on stimulating the imagination and scientific interest in someone? I don’t know about you, but I think it’s priceless. Certain events in our history are enough to get us dreaming about the infinite possibilities that lie out there among the other planets and the distant stars and galaxies. Or course, those events did cost something in terms of money and human effort. There’s always a price, a cost, a tradeoff. The payback is knowledge, which comes with both costs, plus the chance to look at places we’ve never seen before. That’s the essence of exploration.

The New Horizonws team celebrates a successful flyby of Pluto. Image by Carolyn Collins Petersen in the midst of pandemonium.
The New Horizons team celebrates a successful flyby of Pluto. Image by Carolyn Collins Petersen.

New Horizons cost around $700 million, and has certainly inspired people around the world. Worth it? I’d say so. We are supposed to be learning about our universe, using the brains and intellect that evolved along with our bodies. This mission just showed us a world that was long seen only as a point of light. It’s now a place with mountains and craters and icy “continents”, and a “plasma tail’ and a thin atmosphere, and a slew of moons.

Apollo 11 image; Buzz Aldrin's bootprint on the Moon. Courtesy NASA.
Apollo 11 image; Buzz Aldrin’s bootprint on the Moon. Courtesy NASA.

Of course, many people have been celebrating the Apollo 11 landings and the first people to walk on the Moon. The entire Apollo program cost around $25 billion, and its scientific and cultural returns are priceless. We ALL learned something about the Moon, just as we’re all learning something about Pluto with New Horizons. And, about Mars with the missions there. And, about the other planets of the solar system from the many spacecraft we’ve sent out.

We live in an evolving solar system. It hasn’t stopped changing since its formation some 4.5 billion years ago. We’re part of the system, and only recently have we learned to look with scientific eyes at the places that exist in our little part of the galaxy. We’ve learned amazing things through our explorations using both ground-based and space-based instruments. And there’s more out there, if we’re not afraid to go for it.

Is knowing what we know about the solar system and the rest of the universe worth less than the cost of a football stadium? Is it worth less to you personally than the cost of a boutique coffee or a slice of pizza? Is it less important than buying a senator or a whole roomful of them at bargain basement prices? What price do you put on integrity and honesty, scientific curiosity, the urge to KNOW how all this universe works?

You know what MY answer is. Spending money on such exploration benefits people; it creates jobs, stimulates economies and careers, at the same time it teaches us our place in the cosmos. I’d say we got a hell of a deal when we started sending spacecraft out to explore the cosmos. They’re part of us, they’re our eyes and ears on the cosmos, and they are showing us what the universe is made of. Pretty darned good expenditure and use of our time, talents, and energies.

What will we explore next? Exoplanets? There’s more news about those coming soon. How about distant galaxies born in the fires of the first half billion years of the cosmos? Coming up with James Webb Space Telescope. Want to know more about the first stars? Our multi-wavelength observatories in space and on the ground are on the case. Each one of those projects is made up of equipment, sure. But, it’s the people who do the hard work of building, testing, thinking, and sharing the universe with the rest of us. THAT should be worth something to you as you gaze at the stars, look at the pretty pictures, and dream of exploring the cosmos. Shouldn’t it?

New Horizons mission, planetary science, planets, Pluto

Exploring the Mountains of Pluto

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Pluto’s Surface Has Changed Over Time

A newly discovered mountain range lies near the southwestern margin of Pluto’s Tombaugh Regio (Tombaugh Region), situated between bright, icy plains and dark, heavily-cratered terrain. This image was acquired by New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on July 14, 2015 from a distance of 48,000 miles (77,000 kilometers) and received on Earth on July 20. Features as small as a half-mile (1 kilometer) across are visible. Courtesy NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI
A newly discovered mountain range lies near the southwestern margin of Pluto’s Tombaugh Regio (Tombaugh Region), situated between bright, icy plains and dark, heavily-cratered terrain. This image was acquired by New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on July 14, 2015 from a distance of 48,000 miles (77,000 kilometers) and received on Earth on July 20. Features as small as a half-mile (1 kilometer) across are visible. Courtesy NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

So, Pluto has a second set of mountains along one edge of Tombaugh Regio (the heart-shaped region). The planet continues to stun all of us with amazing views sent back by New Horizons, and the mountains are just the latest in a long string of discoveries to come. I can’t say I’m totally surprised to see them; I remember a geology teacher once saying where there’s one mountain range on a world, shaped by some kind of internal process, there’s bound to be another.

These mountains aren’t quite as high as the Norgay Montes, first seen on July 15th, but they’re still pretty spectacular-looking. They rise up to perhaps only a kilometer or so, but they look quite sharp, standing out in relief against the bright landscape. It looks like they may be younger than the surrounding landscape, but that’s just my guess. If so, then this surface is changing, indeed!

The thing that caught my eye after I checked out the mountains was that very interesting interface between the dark region and the brighter material that makes up Sputnik Planum (which is part of Tombaugh Regio). At first glance, I could tell that there’s been some filling in of craters by the white material. That’s another clue that the lighter-colored landscape is much younger than the darker regions. In fact, the team suspects the dark region is billions of years old, while the lighter landscape is less than a hundred million years old. That’s pretty young in planetary science terms, when you think about it. The solar system formed some 4.56 BILLION years ago, so this surface has only been around for a short time compared the age of the Sun and other worlds.

What Could Be Causing the Mountains on Pluto?

As I mentioned in my article of a few days back, called  Pluto is Geologically Active, mountain-building processes here on Earth are driven by plate tectonics, which is itself driven by heat and motions beneath the planet’s crust. We don’t know yet what’s driving it on Pluto. The planet is just about 70 percent rock, so it might be that there’s activity in the interior related to decay of radioactive materials or some other process.

If that activity generates or is driven by heat, that would affect the icy surface, possibly causing mountains to form in some way, and ices to flow to create smoothed-over landscapes. Remember, the ices on Pluto are largely nitrogen and methane, and those can melt and/or sublimate at pretty low temperatures, so you wouldn’t need a lot of heat. I look forward to hearing a more nuanced and scientifically informed interpretation of the images from the New Horizons team.

There will be a science press conference on the 24th (you can watch at NASA.TV), and I suspect we’ll hear more about those mountains and the dichotomy between the dark and light regions of the planet. So, as I like to say, stay tuned!

Note: the spacecraft has gathered 50 gigabits of data, which it will be sending back over the ever-increasing distance between it and the Earth over the next 16 months. At times, the spacecraft will be returning various types of data, not all of it imaging. However, the team will be releasing images as often as they can, generally once a week or so. The best way to keep up with the news from New Horizons is to check out www.nasa.gov/newhorizons and/or pluto.jhuapl.edu — where you’ll find images, videos, and discussions of the latest Pluto scientific discoveries.