Category Archives: Pluto

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!

dwarf planets, New Horizons mission, planetary science, planets, Pluto

Snakeskin Pluto

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New Horizons Images Continue to Dazzle

In this extended color image of Pluto taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, rounded and bizarrely textured mountains, informally named the Tartarus Dorsa, rise up along Pluto’s day-night terminator and show intricate but puzzling patterns of blue-gray ridges and reddish material in between. This view, roughly 330 miles (530 kilometers) across, combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC) on July 14, 2015, and resolves details and colors on scales as small as 0.8 miles (1.3 kilometers). Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI
Pluto sports rounded and bizarrely textured mountains, informally named the Tartarus Dorsa, rise up along Pluto’s day-night terminator and show intricate but puzzling patterns of blue-gray ridges and reddish material in between. This viewi is rougnly 330 miles (530 kilometers) across, combines blue, red and infrared images and resolves details and colors on scales as small as 0.8 miles (1.3 kilometers).
Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

Okay. I am officially surprised. Pluto just got even MORE interesting than ever! Not only is it a colorful-looking icy world, but it’s got the weirdest snakeskin surface features I think I’ve ever seen. As soon as I saw this image, I thought immediately of frozen dunes.

What’s causing them?  Good question.

Nobody knows.

Yet.

You can bet the New Horizons mission scientists are all over these images, trying to explain the kinds of tectonic forces or atmospheric activities that would form such fascinating features. You can see troughs cutting across snaky-looking frozen dune-like features, and some terrain that looks like giant footprints.

My best guess (and it’s only a guess) is that there’s something going on beneath the surface that is softening the ice from below. The frigid temps at the surface lock the softened features into place. Since we know nitrogen is escaping the surface, some of it may well also fall back to form terrain units of some kind.  How that all works and  how you prove it — well, that’s what the New Horizons planetary scientists are working to figure out!

Here’s the sharpest image to date of Pluto’s varied terrain. In this 75-mile (120-kilometer) section of the surface, textured terrain units surround two isolated ice mountains. Courtesy NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

Really detailed images of the surface in Tombaugh Regio also show what looks like the cantaloupe terrain of Triton (at Neptune). This closer look at the smooth, bright surface of the informally named Sputnik Planum (within Tombaugh) shows that it is actually pockmarked by dense patterns of pits, low ridges and scalloped terrain. These could be some more of those dunes I talked about, made of bright ices that are especially susceptible to sublimation and formation of such corrugated ground.

Want to see more of Pluto’s weird terrain? Check out the NASA New Horizons website and the New Horizons mission site — they have the latest and greatest images and explanations about what’s happening out at this distant world.