New Horizons: Nitrogen Ice Flows and Beautiful Haze - http://clapway.com/2015/07/25/new-horizons-nitrogen-ice-flows-and-beautiful-haze654/

As NASA continues to receive and develop the massive stock of imagery and data from New Horizons’ recent flyby of Pluto, the dwarf planet continues to surprise and amaze scientists and enthusiasts alike. The latest images released on Friday reveal a breathtaking silhouette of the dwarf planet’s thin atmosphere, and lays bare nitrogen ice flowing on the surface.

For any still catching up, New Horizons recently earned its place in history as the very first probe to reach Pluto and its five moons on July 14th. The probe was sent into scientific overdrive during its short flyby because it was going much too fast to orbit the dwarf planet.

COULDN’T WE LEARN MORE ABOUT PLUTO IF WE STAYED IN ORBIT?

The thing about interplanetary space travel is…gravity. We couldn’t hope to pack enough chemical fuel to launch anything to the outer planets, because at a certain point we would have to add fuel to lift the extra fuel off of the planet, and more fuel for that fuel’s weight, etc. So instead, NASA sends its probes to rendezvous with objects with particularly high gravity, like Jupiter or Saturn. Then the gas giants’ immense gravity is used to sling-shot the probe, multiplying its speed to a great enough magnitude to shorten its journey by decades. This reduction of transit time also reduces the likelihood of other mishaps, like encounters with space dust travelling faster than the speed of sound, or mechanical failures. Because of its high velocity, there was simply no way for Pluto to slow the spacecraft into a stable orbit, so New Horizons had to work fast.

NEW FINDINGS

NASA’s most recent analyses show subtly differentiable layers of haze in Pluto’s nitrogen, carbon monoxide and methane atmosphere. The atmosphere is roughly one hundred miles deep. “This is our first peek at Pluto’s atmosphere,” exclaimed Michael Summers, New Horizons scientist with George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He added that these atmospheric particles’ slow descent to the surface may be responsible for Pluto’s reddish hue.

What’s really strange is that Pluto’s hazy layer is five times thicker than computer models predicted, but its total mass seems to have been cut in half in just two short years. “That’s pretty astonishing, at least to an atmospheric scientist. That tells you something is happening,” Summers opined.

SIGNS OF GEOLOGIC ACTIVITY

More of NASA’s new data from New Horizons revealed what look like glacial ice flows. But Pluto’s ground temperature is roughly -400 degrees Fahrenheit, which makes it far too cold for the ice to be composed of water.

PLUTO’S SURFACE AS OLD (OR YOUNG) AS DINOSAURS

This not only confirms, but strengthens the fact that much of Pluto’s surface is basically as old as the dinosaurs, roughly a few hundred million years old, which is extremely young on a planetary scale.

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New Horizons: Nitrogen Ice Flows and Beautiful Haze

New Horizons After Pluto - http://clapway.com/2015/07/15/new-horizons-after-pluto567/

After traveling the 3 billion miles, after surviving the radioactive environment of space for 9 years, after carrying the ashes of the astronomer who discovered the dwarf planet, Clyde Tombaugh to his Pluto, the piano-sized probe New Horizons will be constantly transmitting data from its flyby for those of us to ogle and study. The information contained in New Horizons’ transmissions are categorized as low, medium and high priority. New Horizons officials say its final transmission will be in October or November of next year.

NEW HORIZONS EXIST BEYOND PLUTO

The probe was not sent out for the sole purpose of exploring the Plutonian system (i.e. Pluto and its moons). New Horizons loses several watts of power every year, but it still has enough power remaining to function for 20 additional years, and there’s plenty else to see in the outer reaches of our solar system.

TO THE KUIPER BELT

For starters, the spacecraft will penetrate even farther into the Kuiper Belt, a spheroid assemblage of asteroids encapsulating the entire solar system. The largest phenomenon in our system, the Kuiper Belt is host to over 100,000 miniature worlds we’ve never been to before.

Once beyond the Kuiper Belt, New Horizons will follow the voyage of Voyager 1 & 2, a pair of twin, tank-sized probes that gave us our first tour of the outer planets in the seventies and early eighties. Now New Horizons can also move into its mission’s final phase, “to explore the dep reaches of the heliosphere,” said principal investigator Alan Stern. He continues: “Eventually, we’ll get to a point where we can’t operate the primary spacecraft computer and the communications system. We’ve estimated that that point will be reached sometime in the mid 2030s, roughly 20 years from now…[o]ver those next 20 years, if a spacecraft continues to be healthy, it could operate and return scientific data.”

AND BEYOND

If the probe’s “health” is maintained, then perhaps it, like the Voyager probes, could be among the first human artifacts to leave our solar system, and enter the interstellar frontier, where it will eventually go cold, and enter a deep slumber as it drifts for an eternity.

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New Horizons After Pluto

New Horizons" Pluto Map Reveals Strange Bands and Patches - http://clapway.com/2015/07/08/new-horizons-reveals-strange-bands-and-patches987/

One could safely assume most readers didn’t covet their Moon or Mars Maps in their childhood. But there’s always a chance to make amends for your kids’. A new map of Pluto that scientists have constructed from images captured by the famed spacecraft New Horizons has just hit the proverbial press.

Pluto map is a flat representation made from spherical pieces

The map unravels visible pieces of the sphere onto a flat, projected representation, revealing more features scientists have begun to take note of in recent days. They include patches near the equator which alternate between light and dark, and a singular, long, dark band scientists have named “the whale.”

Moby Dick’s Darker Cousin is only the beginning in a string of photos and data

New Horizons, the spacecraft that captured Moby Dick’s darker cousin, is only seven days away from its groundbreaking flyby of Pluto. New Horizons will pass Pluto’s surface at an altitude of about 13,000km. In this first pass, it will snap a veritable plethora of images and other scientific data. But these first pictures of the dwarf planet will be of a sophistication of an entirely different order than those of the Moon, or even our first studies of Mars. New Horizons will capture 5,000 times the data that Mariner did during its visit to the Red Planet. Moreover, targeted areas on Pluto’s surface will be displayed at a resolution better than 100 meters per pixel.

Images available so far are of much lower resolution, being assembled from a combination of the probe’s high-resolution (black and white) LORRI camera and its lower-resolution color imager, which we lovingly refer to as Ralph. Even so, we can still see a slew of different characteristics on the dwarf planet.

A white area near the center of Pluto will be directly below New Horizons upon the probe’s closest pass. On the east side is a splotchy place that’s been the root of the most heated discussion to the present moment. No one seems to know what the blobby patches are, but every one of them is a few kilometers in diameter.

Whale’s “tail” has weird craterlike donut

In what’s called the whale’s “tail,” is an object seeming to take the form of a doughnut. This could actually be an impact crater or a volcano, but at this low resolution either interpretation is equally warranted, i.e., is really unwarranted.

New Horizons has totally recovered from its 4th of July weekend hiccup, when it accidentally entered protective safe mode and dropped its connection with Earth for over an hour. The engineers behind New Horizons’ software have stated they understand the cause of the computer glitch, and have ruled it out of the realm of possibility for the next few days. Now let’s hope the Plutonians haven’t hacked our probe.

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New Horizons" Pluto Map Reveals Strange Bands and Patches