Category Archives: Pluto

New Horizons mission, Pluto

STEM, STEAM, and Pluto

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The Many Views of Pluto

It’s now two weeks from the New Horizons close flyby of Pluto and Charon. The images are flowing, science data are streaming in, and the team has made pictures almost immediately available online for the rest of us to marvel at.  I know for a fact that this mission has taken science educators as well as scientists by storm, and the mission itself has made a lot of information available to educators, the media, and the public. In a delightful development, it has also caught the imagination of artists and musicians as well.

A great many very talented astro-imaging experts have taken to doing a little processing on those releases, resulting in some fine views and a lot of speculation on social media about we’re almost seeing on Pluto and Charon.

A processed version of a New Horizons image of Pluto and Charon, by C. Menoir-Salvan.

For example, this view is a stacked and processed image from a June 18th release from the New Horizons team. The astro-imager is C. Menoir-Salvan, and his work has spurred a LOT Of discussion about what those features could be.

The clearest views are yet to come, so these discussions among planetary science-savvy folks has been very interesting to participate in and follow. Keep in mind that during flyby, we’ll see some images, but due to the lengthy travel time for the signals from New Horizons, the data will be streaming in over the next year or so! We’ll get to see good images of Pluto now, and then the real scientific treasure will make its way to the mission teams. New Horizons is really the scientific gift that keeps on giving!

The Artistic View

Pluto and Charon, a space artist's view of the pair, with a distant Sun in the background. Copyright David A. Hardy/astroart.org
Pluto and Charon, a space artist’s view of the pair, with a distant Sun in the background. Copyright David A. Hardy/astroart.org

Artists and musicians are being inspired by the whole Pluto thing as well, with some lovely additions to the STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) realm. Here are a couple of the many examples I’ve seen float across my view the past few days. The British space artist David Hardy offered his view of what Pluto and Charon look like. He’s very tuned into the science behind what planetary surfaces can look like, and he graciously allowed me to share his view of the double planet here.

Pluto, Charon, and the Sun — a space art scene by scientist and space artist Dan Durda. Copyright Dan Durda.

Dan Durda is a space artist and planetary scientist at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, who has been inspired by New Horizons and the mission to Pluto in more ways than one! Here’s one of his depictions of Pluto and Charon, with the distant Sun shedding a bit of light on the scene. Both Dan and David are members of a wonderful organization called the International Association of Astronomical Artists at IAAA.org, and I count a number of the members as friends and colleagues.

In the music department, there are folks out there creating Pluto tunes and pieces inspired by the distant system. My own favorite composer, Geodesium (the stage name of Mark C. Petersen), created a piece called “Charon” for a project a while back. You can hear a snippet here. It’s on the album Stellar Collections.

Pluto (in the background) and Charon (foreground), as depicted for a press release from Gemini Observatory. Pluto/Charon models from ourtesy of Seeker (Software Bisque); plumes and ice fields added by Mark C. Petersen, Loch Ness Productions. Starfield from DigitalSky 2, courtesy Sky-Skan, Inc.

It’s a space music composition meant to evoke Pluto’s cold, forbidding-looking, yet intriguing companion world and I like to think of it as Charon’s siren song.

Mark also created a vision of Pluto and Charon for a Gemini Observatory press release a few years ago, when astronomers found evidence of possible geyser-like or ice volcano action on Charon. He used a program called Seeker (from Software Bisque), added in a DigitalSky starfield, and some plumes that were indicated in the observations. I can’t wait to see if this vision, as well as Michael’s and Dan’s, have played out for real. Certainly the preliminary science results indicate something interesting happening at these worlds!

New Horizons PI Alan Stern sent me a link to an amazingly cool song written by singer-songwriter Craig Werth and performed by NYC-based folksinger Christine Lavin, who also went out and filmed a lot of people for the segment. It really shows their love of Pluto. The song is called “Oh Pluto!”, and it’s a great tribute to Pluto and its popularity. You’ll see and hear a number of folk legends, an actor from “The Sopranos”, a band member from Dropkick Murphys, as well as men, women, boys and girls from all walks of life, sending their greetings to Pluto.

There are many more folks paying tribute to Pluto in their own ways — they’re engaged, entranced, and excited by the exploration and the discoveries to come. Whoever you are, wherever you are, use your own talents to salute Pluto, and also to the people on the New Horizons mission. They’re dedicated scientists, students, technicians, administrators — all working really hard to bring this distant world into focus for the rest of us!  (P.S. If you know of other space artists and musicians who have created works about Pluto, let me know in the comments and I’ll do a second entry, soon!)


 

astronomy, charon, New Horizons mission, Pluto

Announcing Charon’s Dark Pole

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What’s Causing THAT?

These recent images show the discovery of significant surface details on Pluto’s largest moon, Charon. They were taken by the New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on June 18, 2015. The image on the left is the original image, displayed at four times the native LORRI image size. After applying a technique that sharpens an image (called “deconvolution”), details become visible on Charon, including a distinct dark pole. Deconvolution can occasionally introduce “false” details, so the finest details in these pictures will need to be confirmed by images taken from closer range in the next few weeks. Credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

As the New Horizons spacecraft gets closer to Pluto, we are seeing more detailed images of this world and its companion, Charon. The latest ones, taken with the LORRI instrument onboard the spacecraft, show what looks like a darkened pole on Charon, a somewhat lighter region below it, and some bright regions along the limb. “Fascinating” as Mr. Spock would say. But, what is happening at Charon to make it look like that? The final answer is a couple of weeks away, so let’s talk about how we figure out what’s happening at a world (planet, dwarf planet, moon, asteroid, or comet) from images of it.

An artist’s conception of Charon (with Pluto in the background). The plumes and brighter spots depicted on Charon’s “left side” are thought to be created as water (with some ammonia hydrate mixed in) “erupts” from deep beneath the surface. The material sprays out through cracks in the icy crust, immediately freezes and snows crystalline ice down onto the surface, creating a water-ammonia hydrate ice field. Such fields were detected and studied using the near-infrared imager on Gemini North. (This composite image includes Pluto and Charon models (enhanced), courtesy of Software Bisque. www.seeker3d.com, with plumes and ice fields added by Mark C. Petersen, Loch Ness Productions. Star field from DigitalSky 2, courtesy Sky-Skan, Inc.)

As in all other aspects of planetary science, you have to look for processes on the world you’re studying to understand how they affect the surface of that place. For example, if you were approaching Earth and were still quite a ways away as you came in to assume a standard orbit (Mr. Sulu), you’d likely notice the poles, the bluish color, and the darker areas that indicate land masses. The existence of ice at the poles tells you something about the climate and temperature in those regions. The bluish water in a liquid state tells you that conditions are good enough to permit liquid water. And, the land masses have many messages of their own, from the signatures of volcanoes to the ongoing (and long-term) deformation of the surface due to plate tectonics. What you see on Earth, even at the most cursory level — and at Pluto and Charon — are all caused by complex interactions comprising chemical reactions, atmospheric mixing, and actions going on below the surface.

So, with that in mind, what’s going on at Charon? I wish I could tell you for sure. But, it looks really, really interesting! Now that we’re seeing a great variety of surface features (or, as the scientists call it, “terrain types”) it’s a hint that Charon is not just a frozen dead world. A dark terrain could indicate some sort of chemical interaction as sunlight hits specific ices on the surface. That normally happens with methane-rich ice, which Charon doesn’t appear to have much (if any) of. Instead, it has been measured to be mostly water and nitrogen ice.

However, I suspect there’s more going on at Charon than meets the eye.

A few years ago, we created a graphic “approximation” of Charon for a project with Gemini Observatory. We had to guess at what the surface looked like. You can see that, even in 2007, we had an idea that there’d be darker areas on an already darkish object. The real interesting bit was that astronomers using Gemini telescope had spotted what looked like evidence for geyser-like activity on Charon. I will be really interested to see if New Horizons finds that same evidence and confirms such activity. If it does, then we’re looking at a dynamic world with an interior that is forcing mixtures of ammonia hydrates (ammonia mixed with water) and water crystals onto the surface.  And, THAT’s cool.

I don’t know why Charon has a dark pole, yet. I suspect that the New Horizons mission team members don’t YET know for sure. They’re likely going through all the ideas en masse, and once they have more data, we’ll all know what’s ticking inside this little world.