Category Archives: New Horizons mission

dwarf planets, New Horizons mission, planets, Pluto

Pluto: the 9th Planet is a Major Stunner

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Pluto in High — and I DO Mean HIGH — Resolution

This mosaic is composed of the sharpest views of Pluto that NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft obtained during its flyby of the distant planet on July 14, 2015. The pictures are part of a sequence taken near New Horizons’ closest approach to Pluto, with resolutions of about 250-280 feet (77-85 meters) per pixel. Courtesy NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
This mosaic is composed of the sharpest views of Pluto that NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft obtained during its flyby of the distant planet on July 14, 2015. The pictures are part of a sequence taken near New Horizons’ closest approach to Pluto, with resolutions of about 250-280 feet (77-85 meters) per pixel. Courtesy NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

The New Horizons mission has been steadily returning its treasure trove of images from the July 2015 flyby. Today’s image release showed just WHY it was important to send a darned good camera/detector along for the ride! It’s even more amazing than the “snakeskin Pluto” images I wrote about earlier!

Feast your eyes on this strip image of Pluto’s surface. Go ahead, click on it. Zoom into it and really check out all the features. I am particularly intrigued by the “dune-ish” looking features in the lower part of the image. These are giant ice blocks bounded by the al-Idrisi Mountains that border Sputnik Planum. The “dunes” are not wind-driven piles of sand as they would be here on Earth. These rippled surface features form as the nitrogen-rich ices on the surface undergo some kind of heating that causes the ices to sublimate (think of dry ice sizzling in the sunlight here on Earth).

Also, check out those mountains!  They’re made of water ice and jutting up above the surface. Pluto’s highlands form a sort of “shoreline” that rises above Sputnik Planum. Notice that some of the mountainsides are bright while others appear to be darkened by something. As Alan Stern said during the flyby, “Who ordered THAT?”

If you’re a crater fan, there are plenty of them on Pluto’s surface.  But, there are also some strange-looking crater-type formations that are probably more like sunken pits. They could be the result of subsurface activity. Maybe something heated the ice from below, causing it to soften and then subside (sink in on itself). Some of those mountains you see could be ice volcanoes, too. They would definitely require some kind of heating from below to start the flow of “molten” ice up to the surface.

Just to give you a sense of scale, the image strip covers a region about 50 miles (80 kilometers) across, spanning from the mountains to the heart of Sputnik Planum. The smallest features are about the size of half a city block. As you scan the image you’ll find craters, mountains, glacial features, and some rugged areas called badlands.

This is the kind of visual exploration planetary scientists love to do if they can’t get to the surface of a world themselves. You can spend a lot of time poring over this image and thinking about how wonderful, weird, and fascinating the 9th planet really is!

What amazes me is that all of this that you’re seeing is ice. That’s not surprising in itself. Pluto is an icy-surfaced world, which we pretty much knew going in. However, the sheer variety of this world’s surface features remained unknown until the New Horizons flyby. We’re just starting to see what a complex surface this planet has.

To put this accomplishment into perspective, the spacecraft traveled nearly three billion miles (about 5 billion kilometers) for nearly 10 years and is returning high-resolution images five times better than the images returned by Voyager 2 of Pluto’s icy cousin world Triton (which orbits Neptune).

We live in amazing times, folks. Why?  Because, you can see things like this courtesy of a little spacecraft not much bigger than a grand piano!

Enjoy — and, when you’re done here, check out more images and a great little movie, over at the New Horizons team Web site!

New Horizons mission, planetary science, Pluto

Meet Mysterious Kerberos

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Pluto’s Tiny Moon Ready for a Close-up

This image of Kerberos was created by combining four individual Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) pictures taken on July 14, approximately seven hours before New Horizons’ closest approach to Pluto, at a range of 245,600 miles (396,100 km) from Kerberos. Courtesy NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
This image of Kerberos was created by combining four individual Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) pictures taken on July 14, approximately seven hours before New Horizons’ closest approach to Pluto, at a range of 245,600 miles (396,100 km) from Kerberos. Courtesy NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

It may not look like much, but this is the long-awaited view of Pluto’s tiny moon Kerberos. This little place is about 12 kilometers across, and has what looks like a double-lobed shape — as if two tiny chunks of “stuff” had slammed together to make a bigger one. The bigger of the two lobes is about kilometers across and the smaller is about 3 kilometers and the images and data taken with New Horizons show that Kerberos is highly reflective and coated with what appears to be water ice.

Pluto has five moons — Charon, Styx, Nyx, Hydra and Kerberos. All of them were imaged by the spacecraft, which is still streaming data to Earth (and will be for the next year or so).

What’s Up with New Horizons?

Since I haven’t written about Pluto and New Horizons for a while, let’s take a look at what else is happening with the mission. First, the spacecraft just did the first of four maneuvers to put the spacecraft on a path toward 2014 MU69, a Kuiper Belt object about a billion miles away from Pluto. The mission team is preparing a proposal for those observations, which will take place on January 1, 2019 as the spacecraft flies by on its way through the Belt. Three more trajectory course correction maneuvers will take place in the next two weeks.

New Horizons position relative to Pluto on October 22, 2015. Courtesy New Horizons mission.
New Horizons position relative to Pluto on October 22, 2015. Courtesy New Horizons mission. (Click to embiggen.)

Second, as I mentioned above, as it flies away from Pluto, the spacecraft is playing back the data from the July encounter and will be doing so until autumn 2016. The images and data are coming back at around a 1.12 kilobits per second to an antenna at the Deep Space Network.

Finally, each week the mission team is releasing some pretty amazing images from the Pluto flyby. Check out the science image gallery at the mission’s Web site, and browse to your heart’s content. I guarantee it — you’ll be agog at what this fast-moving little mission has found at Pluto. And, if all goes well, we’ll get to see another KBO in just a few years. It’s the gift that keeps on giving!