Data From New Horizons Brings Pluto"s Planet Classification Back Into Question - http://clapway.com/2015/07/26/data-from-new-horizons-brings-plutos-planet-classification-back-into-question567/

The scientific community loves a good debate, and perhaps one of the most on-again, off-again debates is about Pluto — is it a planet? On Friday, NASA’s planetary scientists jumped back in the debate after revealing that the dwarf planet is geologically active.

New Horizons Pals up with Pluto

In a press conference on Friday, new data from New Horizons indicated that Pluto is, in fact, quite a bit more complex than scientists originally believed.

“It’s very hard not to call an object with this level of complexity in its geology, and such complex seasons, a planet,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator at Southwest Research Institute.

According to the press conference, Pluto has an extensive, hazy atmosphere, and new glacier plains made up of nitrogen ice that are still actively carving away at Pluto’s surface. Scientists originally believed that Pluto was struck by an object so large that it blew bits of its mass away, which created its five moons. Oddly enough, there is no evidence of this impact since the dwarf planet’s surface is clean and almost perfectly spherical.

Making a Case Against Pluto

Back in 2006 the International Astronomical Union (IAU) delisted Pluto as a planet, ‘downgrading’ it to a dwarf planet. However, the original vote was so close that the new information being brought to light by New Horizons might force the IAU to reconsider.

In the original debate, the IAU had defined a planet as having three defining characteristics: it has to orbit around the sun, it must have a spherical shape, and it has to have “cleared the neighborhood” around its orbital plane.

Pluto has always been a little different from the rest of the gang, though. It’s smaller than our own moon, for instance, and it has an incredible elliptical orbit around the Sun, which is unique when compared to all of the other planets.

Unfortunately, it’s the third defining characteristic that puts a heavy damper on letting Pluto join the club again. The dwarf planet is located just in the inner edge of the Kuiper Belt, which is a collection of icy bodies right at the edge of the solar system. The more bodies discovered in the Kuiper Belt, the more the odds stack against the dwarf planet.

NASA Goes to Bat for Pluto

Stern has been poking holes in the IAU’s definition of a planet since 2006, so it’s no surprise that he’s using this new information to further cement his stance on Pluto’s planetship.

As Stern points out, most planets in the Solar System don’t have stable orbits, there are still plenty of asteroids cruising around Earth, Mars, and Jupiter. Last of all, Stern notes that less than five percent of the entire astronomical community voted to delist Pluto.

Despite Stern’s obvious bias, Pluto is getting plenty of support elsewhere, too. New Mexico and Illinois have both passed legislation which defines Pluto as a planet. There is also a lot of public support from people who just want to see the old band get back together.

Unfortunately for Pluto, its fate is tied to New Horizons. As it continues its mission to explore other bodies located in the Kuiper Belt, scientists will have a better understanding of Pluto’s neighbors and decide on a final classification.

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Data From New Horizons Brings Pluto"s Planet Classification Back Into Question

Closeup Images of Pluto - http://clapway.com/2015/07/16/closeup-images-of-pluto878/

When New Horizons executed its flyby of Pluto on July 14th, 2015 at a distance of 47,800 miles (77,000 km), it snapped a series of hi-res, closeup images. The first ever, in fact. The two NASA revealed to us in a Live Stream conference yesterday, one closeup image of Pluto and the other of its moon, Charon, have given reason for the scientists to come up with new theories to how planets form.

PLUTO AND CHARON ARE ACTIVE PLANETS

The new photos show that both the dwarf planet and its moon Charon have recently been geographically active. From Pluto’s closeup image we can see massive ice mountains, while on Charon we can actually see a canyon so deep you can actually see through the edge of the planet (at about 2 o’clock, roughly 5 miles deep!).

“The most striking thing about this image is, we have not yet found a single impact crater on this region,” said John Spencer, member of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado during a news briefing this Wednesday. If you look again at the closeup image of Pluto, you may ask yourself why you didn’t notice that right away. This is very significant, because the presence (or absence) of craters indicated a planet’s crust’s age.

PLUTO’S SURFACE AS OLD AS DINOSAURS

“Just eyeballing it, we think it has to be probably less than 100 million years old,” estimated spencer, deputy leader of New Horizons’ geology and geophysics investigation (CGI) team. This means that Pluto’s geology was probably active while the dinosaurs roamed the Earth. And that is very recent, on a cosmic scale. “It might be active right now. With no craters, you just can’t put a lower limit on how active it might be.”

To be clear, all of this new scientific knowledge was garnered from one photo of one percent of Pluto’s surface. Jeff Moore, of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, said of the surface: “[it’s] one of the youngest surfaces we’ve ever seen in the solar system.”

OTHER ACTIVE BODIES, OTHER EXPLANATIONS

A few other small planetary bodies in our solar system have shown ongoing geologic activity. Enceladus, a geyser-shooting moon of Saturn, and the hot and volcanic Jovian satellite Io. The difference is that these planets’ interiors are heated by the gravitational tugs of Saturn and Jupiter, respectively. This process is known as tidal heating.

“This can’t happen on Pluto, because there is no giant body that can deform it on a regular basis,” wondered Spencer. “This is telling us that you do not need tidal heating to power geologic activity on icy moons. That’s a really important discovery that we just made this morning,” he concluded in deadpan humor to applause of the audience.

The thing is that Pluto and Charon aren’t tugging on one another, though, because “Pluto and Charon are in tidal equilibrium,” objected Alan Stern. “Charon orbits equivalent of geosynchronous orbit, and it is also spinning at the same rate that pluto spins. So there is no significant change in tidal energy anymore.”

PRELIMINARY HYPOTHESES

One hypothesis as to how Pluto and Charon have managed to remain active is by having never lost their internal radioactive heat for a much longer amount of time than scientists had estimated possible. There is also the possibility that both Charon and Pluto once possessed subsurface Oceans, like Europa, which froze so gradually that heat was continually released into either body’s crusts.

Whatever it is we continue to learn of the Plutonian system as images and data of this brief flyby continue to return to Earth, one thing is for certain: the cost and risk involved in sending this piano-sized probe to flyby Pluto was worth the quantity and significance of scientific knowledge we are gaining, and we know this with one closeup image of Pluto.

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Closeup Images of Pluto

New Horizons" New Images of Pluto Echoes Mars" Camera Debut - http://clapway.com/2015/07/15/new-horizons-new-images-of-pluto-echoes-mars-camera-debut324/

With all of the excitement in anticipation of the imminent arrival of Hi-Res photos of Pluto and its Moon Charon from New Horizons’ flyby yesterday, this is a golden opportunity to remember how planetary exploration by space probe began. Fifty years ago, on July 14th, 1965, NASA’s Mariner 4 captured 23 closeup images of Mars, that dusty next-door neighbor of ours. It was the first time we had seen another planet so close.

NEW HORIZONS ECHOES MARINER 4

Just as we are about to echo with Pluto and New Horizons, the images arrived precisely one day after Mariner 4 successfully engaged its flyby of Mars. Fifty years later, we’re about to repeat the maneuver, in a cosmic dance that’s symphony to Mariner 4’s prelude.

Alan Stern, an academic expert at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, agrees: “You couldn’t have written a script that was better.” Just like Mariner 4, New Horizons is teasing science lovers, prudishly forcing us all to wait for hour after hour until the final unveiling occurs. One should note that today a debutante move faster; millennials aren’t waiting as long as the baby boomers did.

NEW IMAGES WILL COME QUICKER

This afternoon, NASA is receiving a smorgasbord of imagery and scientific data, which will all be transmitted to NASA headquarters in a matter of minutes. In 1965, however, each image Mariner 4’s television camera captured required 10 hours to be uploaded and transmitted.

“If someone had asked ‘What do you expect to see?’ we would have said ‘craters’ …[yet] the fact that craters were there, and a predominant land form, was somehow surprising,” reminisces Robert Leighton, Caltech geology professor, who dressed Marner with its camera, and its vast assemblage of instruments.

BEGINNINGS OF INTERPLANETARY EXPLORATION

Leighton and several more Caltech physicists, engineers and geologists were responsible for lifting the then-infantile NASA and its subordinate Jet Propulsion Laboratory out of the crib, and throwing it out the window hard enough to achieve orbit. woof.

John Grotzinger, chairman of Caltech’s Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences describes the atmosphere of the times: “These early flyby missions showed the enormous potential of Mars to provide insight into the evolution of a close cousin to Earth and stimulated the creation of a program dedicated to iterative exploration involving orbiters, landers and rovers.”

ALIEN AESTHETICS, HUMAN SENTIMENTS

Since Mariner 4 first graced Mars’ atmosphere, 19 probes have followed in kind, orbiting and landing on Mars. However, twenty-five other probes have failed. But the sacrifices were certainly not in vain, because the advent of imaging other planets coincided with our first true scientific enquiry into the planets, and sent the captivated the public at large with contradictory sentiments like the beauty in alienness.

Let’s enjoy Pluto, and celebrate history today.

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New Horizons" New Images of Pluto Echoes Mars" Camera Debut

Learning more and more about #dwarfplanet #Pluto. - http://clapway.com/2015/07/13/pluto-is-bigger-than-previously-thought-245/

A briefing by mission control for the New Horizons mission held on the morning of Monday, July 13th at the John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory has stated that they are now much more confident of the diameter of Pluto. On the now dwarf planet that was stripped of its planet-hood in 2006, they are saying its size is larger than what was once thought.

Pluto’s Real Measurements

New pictures taken by NuSTAR reveal that Pluto is bigger and now measures around 1,473 miles (~ 2,370 km) in diameter with a margin error of 12.4 miles (20 km). Its previous measurements were around 1,472 miles (~ 2,368 km) in diameter with the same error accounted for. Because the margin of error is the same for both of the measurements, because the most recent one is bigger, it is a confirmation that the “dwarf planet” is bigger than what was originally calculated. Though the previous measurements were off by only about one mile (~1.61 km), the mass has stayed the same, meaning that the known density of Pluto changes dramatically.

What This Changes

As of right now, the density of Pluto changes, therefore changing the previous assumptions to permit for that loss. This means that much of the information that scientists “know” about the planet must change because it is bigger than previous estimates. One possibility that Alan Stern, the principal investigator on the matter, proposes is that there is more ice and less rock on the planet than what was assumed.

The Current Confirmations of New Horizons

At this time, with the new measurement of Pluto, the dwarf planet is confirmed to be the largest object in the Kuiper Belt, the ring of space debris at the outer edges of our solar system. Just because Pluto is bigger than any other known object in the Kuiper Belt does not mean that it’s the most massive or ‘heaviest’. That title goes to Eris, which was in fact another dwarf planet that helped strip Pluto of its status as a full-fledged planet.

Because this is man’s vicarious foray into “the final frontier”, there is no telling what could be found. Other larger objects may be found, thus taking the titles from both Pluto as well as Eris. Every new discovery that humanity makes–especially concerning space–leads it towards the future and a more definite understanding of the earth and other worlds alike.

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Pluto is Bigger Than Previously Thought

"This is the first reconnaissance mission to explore the far away world of Pluto." - http://clapway.com/2015/06/22/nasa-spacecraft-records-first-color-video-of-pluto-charon-123/

 

An update on NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft’s mission: Its successfully allowed NASA to capture the first color movies of the dwarf planet Pluto and its moon Charon.

PLUTO, NOW IN COLOR

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft snapped images of Pluto and Charon on nine occasions during a period from May 29-June 3 using its “Ralph” Multicolor Visible Imaging Camera. The blue, red, and near-infrared images were used to create the first movies of Pluto and its largest moon, and in near-true color.

The New Horizons team used the same set of images to create two videos—one showing a Pluto-centric view, and the other showing a barycentric view. As its name suggests, Pluto is centered in the Pluto-centric version, and Charon’s movements are shown in relation to Pluto’s position. The movements of both dwarf planet and its satellite are shown in the barycentric version, as they move around their shared center of gravity.

“It’s exciting to see Pluto and Charon in motion and in color,” says New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern. He continues, “Even at this low resolution, we can see that Pluto and Charon have different colors—Pluto is beige-orange, while Charon is grey. Exactly why they are so different is the subject of debate.”

A BINARY PLANET

Pluto’s discovery in 1930 makes it a relatively recent addition to our solar system. It was demoted from full planet status in 2006 when similar-sized objects were detected in the Kuiper Belt between Neptune and Pluto (Although Pluto is officially recognized as a dwarf planet, its status is debated, and some scientists still regard Pluto as an official planet).

Aside from its size, Pluto is special compared to other objects in our solar system because of its large moon Charon. According to NASA, planets in our solar system typically have a planet:moon mass ratio of 10,000:1. Pluto and Charon’s is 8:1, which puts the center-of-mass between the two objects outside the surface of these objects.

This special feature earns Pluto-Charon the title of binary planet. And this is the only recognized binary planet in our solar system.

EXPLORING THE UNKNOWN

The New Horizons spacecraft launched on January 19, 2006, and just began its study of Pluto in the summer of 2015.

This is the first reconnaissance mission to explore the far away world of Pluto. So New Horizons is providing scientists with valuable information about the dwarf planet that will hopefully shed light on the geology, atmosphere, and interior makeup of Pluto.

The spacecraft’s extended mission will explore other worlds in the Kuiper Belt. New Horizons is scheduled to make its closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015.

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NASA Spacecraft Records First Color Video of Pluto, Charon