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Hello Pluto! NASA's Visit to the Mystery World Begins

A remarkable spacecraft approaches the solar system's ninth planet (and yes, it's a planet)

On the spacecraft are some of the ashes of Pluto's discoverer Clyde Tombaugh who died in 1997. Pluto was discovered at 17° Cancer in 1930. In July 2015 Pluto will be at 14° Capricorn opposite the discovery degree.

It's not exactly top secret, but it is too little known: this month, a small, robot spacecraft-built, launched and guided by a team of over 2,500 Americans-will begin the exploration of far-away Pluto and its five known moons. Lasting from January through July 2015, this epic journey is very much the Everest of planetary exploration.


http://time.com/3645704/pluto-new-horizons-spacecraft/

New Horizons begins first approach phase around Pluto

January 17, 2015
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online

After a journey of more than eight years, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has finally entered the first of several planned approach phases around Pluto, and these will culminate with a historic first-ever flyby of the dwarf planet this summer.

According to a statement by Jim Green, director of the US space agency's Planetary Science Division in Washington DC, "NASA's first mission to distant Pluto will also be humankind's first close up view of this cold, unexplored world in our solar system. The New Horizons team worked very hard to prepare for this first phase, and they did it flawlessly."

New Horizons, which lifted off in January 2006, woke up from its final hibernation period last month after a voyage of more than three billion miles, NASA officials said. It will pass close to Pluto in the near future, travelling inside the orbits of its five known moons, and will complete its long-awaited flyby on July 14.

To prepare for that encounter, which will take place 4.67 billion miles (7.5 billion kilometers) from Earth, the mission's science, engineering, and spacecraft operations teams configured the probe for distant observations of Pluto's system. The teams started with a long-distance photo shoot using its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) instrument on January 25.

"We've completed the longest journey any spacecraft has flown from Earth to reach its primary target, and we are ready to begin exploring," explained Alan Stern, principal investigator for the New Horizons mission at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

According to NASA, LORRI is scheduled to take hundreds of pictures of Pluto over the next several months, helping to fine-tune current estimates of the distance between New Horizons and Pluto. While the dwarf planet's system will appear to be nothing more than little bright dots in the camera's view until May, the data will help navigators program course-corrections.

The first such maneuver could take place as early as March, they said.

"We need to refine our knowledge of where Pluto will be when New Horizons flies past it," explained Mark Holdridge, New Horizons encounter mission manager at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.

"The flyby timing also has to be exact, because the computer commands that will orient the spacecraft and point the science instruments are based on precisely knowing the time we pass Pluto - which these images will help us determine," he added. This will be the first time that images from New Horizons will be used to help pinpoint Pluto's location.

The first approach phase will last until spring, and during its approach, the spacecraft will be also be involved in several other scientific research projects. According to NASA, its instruments will collect continuous data on the interplanetary environment where the planetary system orbits, including measurements of the high-energy particles streaming from the sun and dust-particle concentrations in the inner reaches of the Kuiper Belt.

More extensive studies of Pluto will begin in the spring, when cameras and spectrometers on board New Horizons will being providing higher-resolution images than those that can be taken on Earth.

Eventually, the probe will be able to obtain photos with quality high enough to map Pluto and its moons more accurately than previously possible. It will even explore the outer region of the solar system and the thousands of Pluto-like small, icy planetoids believed to be there.

Who knows, maybe it will find a wormhole to other universes

Nasa spacecraft in range for Pluto's first close up images

DEBORAH NETBURN
LA Times
Last updated 09:43, January 26 2015

Pluto, get ready for your close-up.

After travelling nine years across more than 3 billion kilometres of space, a spacecraft the size of a grand piano is about to give humanity its first high-resolution view of the dwarf planet that's about two-thirds the size of our moon.

Nobody knows what the rendezvous will reveal. Pluto's icy surface may resemble an extreme version of Antarctica, with snow-capped mountains, steep crevasses and towering ice cliffs. The planet could be surrounded by rings of tiny ice particles, like its giant neighbour Neptune. There may even be evidence that an ancient ocean once sloshed beneath the frozen crust of its largest moon, Charon.

When it comes to Pluto, nothing is certain.

"Our knowledge of Pluto is quite meagre," said planetary scientist Alan Stern, the principal investigator for the Nasa mission known as New Horizons. "It is very much like our knowledge of Mars was before our first mission there 50 years ago."

New Horizons is poised to change all that. This week, the spacecraft's long-range cameras will begin snapping pictures of Pluto and its moons against a backdrop of stars. New Horizons has been taking detailed measurements of the dust and charged particles in the dwarf planet's environment since mid-January.

More data will be collected during the months leading up to the mission's big moment this summer: a close approach on July 14 that will take the spacecraft just over 12,000km from Pluto's surface.

From that distance, New Horizons will be able to determine what the dwarf planet is made of, create temperature maps of its multi-colored surface, and look for auroras in its thin atmosphere. Scientists and the public will see the first high-definition images later in the year.

Until now, the best pictures astronomers have managed to get consist of a few hazy pixels that were captured by the Hubble Space Telescope more than a decade ago. The resolution is so poor that if you looked at a comparable image of Earth, you wouldn't be able to distinguish the continents from the seas.

The instruments on New Horizons will take images so detailed that if they were pictures of Los Angeles, they would show individual runways at Los Angeles International Airport, said Stern, who is based at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

"What I'm most looking forward to is taking this point of light and transforming it into a planet," he said.

The existence of a planet beyond Neptune was first hypothesise in the early 20th century after scientists noticed what they thought were disturbances in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus. Those wobbles turned out to be measurement errors, but decades of searching for the elusive "Planet X" led astronomers to Pluto in 1930.

Despite its great distance and diminutive size, scientists have been able to glean a remarkable amount of information from the anemic data gathered so far. By watching Pluto's movements across the night sky, they deduced that it takes 248 Earth years to make one trip around the sun. Because Pluto's brightness oscillates in a regular pattern, they think it makes a complete rotation on its axis every 6.4 Earth days.

Astronomers also noted that Pluto ventures far above and below the paths of the major planets in our night sky, leading them to conclude that its orbital plane has a distinctive tilt.

Close observations have revealed that Pluto has at least five moons - the biggest being Charon, which is about the size of Texas. After watching how Pluto's gravity affects the movement of these moons, scientists have a sense of what the dwarf planet's mass and volume might be and how much of it is made of rock and ice.

By examining the sunlight that reflects off Pluto through a prism, astronomers have been able to detect frozen methane, nitrogen and carbon monoxide on its surface. They've also determined that water ice appears to be absent.

Astronomers can even get a rough approximation of the temperature on Pluto's surface by using large telescopes to look at the radiation emitted from its surface after it travels feebly across billions of miles of space.

"It is amazing what scientists can squeeze out of pathetic data," said Hal Weaver, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University and the project scientist on New Horizons.

But in the last few decades, scientists have hit a wall.

"At some point you get the maximum amount of information out of the data that you can, and the only way to advance your understanding is to send a spacecraft out," said Richard Binzel, a professor at MIT and co-investigator on New Horizons.

Nasa has considered going to Pluto many times over the last 25 years, but three previous missions - Pluto Fast Flyby, Pluto Express and Pluto Kuiper Express - were shelved or cancelled. New Horizons got the green light in 2001 with a relatively low budget of US$700 million (more than NZ$900m).

"It is going to be a huge advance over anything we've done so far with telescopes on the ground," said UCLA astronomer Dave Jewitt.

The mission got a boost from the 1992 discovery by Jewitt and his former graduate student Jane Luu that Pluto was not alone in the distant band of the solar system now known as the Kuiper Belt. More than 1500 Kuiper Belt objects have been found so far - a cosmic zoo of bodies that vary in size, colour and composition.

Occasionally, these bodies get knocked out of their distant orbits and come zooming to the inner solar system, ejecting gas and dust as they encounter the sun's warmth for the first time. These are known as the short-period comets.

A handful of spacecraft have flown to these comets, including the European Space Agency's Rosetta orbiter. But New Horizons' visit to Pluto will provide the first glimpse of a Kuiper Belt object in its native habitat.

Pluto is the largest known member of the Kuiper Belt, but not by much. The dwarf planet Eris is close enough in size that astronomers briefly thought it might be larger, though that is no longer the case.

Pluto was still considered a full-fledged planet when New Horizons blasted off from Earth in 2006, but it was demoted to dwarf planet a few months later. The International Astronomical Union, which makes such determinations, said Pluto didn't make the cut because it wasn't hefty enough to prevent similar-sized objects from forming in its section of the solar system.

This indignity has not stopped the New Horizons scientists from describing their mission as one of planetary exploration.

"We will find out if it has enough mass that we think it deserves to be in the planet category," said Weaver, who helped find four of Pluto's five confirmed moons. "For now, I think calling it a dwarf planet still makes it a planet. Is a Chihuahua any less of a dog because it is small?"

Even if Pluto turns out to be smaller than astronomers anticipate, Binzel said he won't be disappointed.

"There is nothing about the quest for knowledge about Pluto that has anything to do with its label," he said.

New Horizons will spend most of 2015 collecting data from Pluto, its moons and its local area. Scientists anticipate that it will take until the fall of 2016 for the spacecraft to deliver its trove of data back to Earth.

By then, New Horizons may be on its way to visit other objects in the Kuiper Belt, if Nasa opts to extend the mission. Scientists have already identified two candidates, each about the size of Orange County, that they would like to study once the primary mission is over.

"They are another billion miles further out, and it would take us until 2019 to get there," Stern said. But astronomers don't want to miss this chance to visit objects that have been in a deep freeze since the dawn of the solar system.

"The spacecraft is healthy and full of fuel," he said. "The instruments are approved to go further."

Hi Rad and Linda,

I wonder if this will correlate with the mainstream, the consensus, gaining new insights into the nature of the Soul and begin to accept reincarnation as fact.

Time will tell.

All the best

What would it be like to live on Pluto?

http://www.space.com/28971-how-to-live-on-pluto.html?utm_source=base&utm_medium=most-popular&utm_campaign=related_test

See the video, and answer the 10 quizz questions

I sure hope the navigation software is encoded with Pluto Vol. 1  :)

Blurry Pluto will become clear with NASA flyby

Agence France-Presse
15 Apr 2015 at 05:49 ET 

The best picture we have of Pluto is a blurry, pixelated blob, but that is about to change when a NASA spacecraft makes the first-ever flyby of the dwarf planet.

The US space agency's unmanned New Horizons spacecraft is scheduled to pass by Pluto on July 14, and will send back unprecedented high-resolution images, allowing people to glimpse the surface of the distant celestial body in rich detail.

Pluto was long considered the ninth planet in the solar system, and the furthest from the sun. It was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006.

Rocky on the inside and icy on the outside, Pluto has five moons and resides in the Kuiper Belt, a zone of the solar system that is a relic of the era of planetary formation more than 4.5 billion years ago, and contains comets and the building blocks of small planets.

"It sounds like science fiction but it is not," said Alan Stern, principal investigator on the New Horizons mission.

"Three months from today, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will make the first exploration of the Pluto system, the Kuiper Belt and the farthest shore of exploration ever reached by humankind," Stern told reporters Tuesday.

- Size of a piano -

New Horizons, about the size of a baby grand piano, is the fastest moving spacecraft ever launched, and is traveling about a million miles (1.6 million kilometers) a day on its way to this unexplored frontier.

The 1,000-pound (465-kilogram) vehicle launched in 2006, on a journey of some three billion miles to get to Pluto.

It is powered by plutonium since the sunlight is so weak at that distance that solar arrays - often used in other kinds of spacecraft - would not work.

Stern described the spacecraft as being "in perfect health" and carrying a "scientific arsenal" of the most powerful suite of seven scientific instruments ever brought to bear on the first reconnaissance of a new celestial body.

"Nothing like this has been done in a quarter century and nothing like this is planned by any space agency ever again," Stern said.

New Horizons aims to map the geology of Pluto and its moons. The largest, Charon, is the size of Texas.

Scientists hope to learn more about the atmosphere of Pluto, which is mainly nitrogen like Earth's, and find out if Pluto and Charon have interior oceans.

- Fast flyby -

In mid-July, the spacecraft will pass by Pluto at a speed of 31,000 miles (50,000 kilometers) per hour.

The New Horizons spacecraft management team on Earth is aiming for a target point 7,750 miles from Pluto's surface, but it will not be easy to get into the right position.

"We are flying three billion miles. We have to hit a target that is 60 by 90 miles, and we have to hit it within 100 seconds after nine and a half years. That's the kind of precision we have to navigate to," said Glen Fountain, New Horizons project manager at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

Starting in May, high resolution images of Pluto and Charon should start arriving on Earth, said Cathy Olkin, New Horizons deputy project scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

The spacecraft will continue sending bits of data and photos from the flyby until October 2016.

"We are going to have surprises and discoveries over the next year and a half," Olkin told reporters.

Already, some images have begun to arrive, and atmospheric studies of the surface ices will begin in May and June, followed by plasma data, geologic and color data in August and more science in September.

But on the day of the closest approach, July 14, there will be no images, she said.

"We need to keep our sights on Pluto, we need to train our instruments on Pluto," Olkin said.

"We are all going to have to be patient while New Horizons is exploring Pluto."

After the flyby of Pluto, New Horizons will carry on into the Kuiper Belt to study more about the history of planetary formation.

This is SO exciting!!!  :D

Can't wait to see the high resolution images of Pluto!

The New Horizons probe, which is bearing down on Pluto, has captured its first colour image of the distant dwarf planet:

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-32311907

New Horizons to study spider-like patterns on Pluto

April 27, 2015
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com - @BednarChuck

When NASA's New Horizons spacecraft makes its flyby of Pluto in July, scientists are hoping to get an up-close look at dark, spider-like surface patterns caused by nitrogen ice and gas eruptions triggered during the dwarf planet's ice geyser season.

As Discovery News explained on Friday, during Pluto's ice geyser season, sunlight hits its north pole, causing ice and gas to spray across the surface. The patterns formed as a result of this odd phenomenon have been spotted several times over the years by ground-based observatories, and by the Hubble Space Telescope, but the US space agency is hoping to get a closer look.

Past observations have been unable to resolve details of the dwarf-planet's surface, but have managed to confirm color and lighting changes that have taken place on a grand scale over the past four years. New Horizons could shed new light on these changes.

Evidence of frost movement found on the dwarf planet

Bonnie Buratti of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory told the website that she and her colleagues are "pretty certain there is some kind of movement of frost" on Pluto. To support that theory, she cites evidence of telescope observations demonstrating how the planet reflects light while it spins on its axis.

Buratti and her colleagues compared those curves to simulated ones which assume that there is no frost rising from Pluto's ice caps and being deposited elsewhere, causing some of the surface to become darker and others to become lighter, the website said. The modeled light curves do not match the observed ones, the JPL researcher explained.

"We compared it and for the last four years we've had substantial changes," Buratti explained to Discovery News. Those changes are taking place as Pluto moves further away from the sun, but also during a period when the north pole of the planet is turning towards the star at the center of the solar system, creating an Earth-like northern summer.

Pluto could have geysers

Buratti and colleagues from Boston University, UCLA and Grays Harbor College report their findings on Pluto in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. They predict that New Horizons will find explosive geysers similar to those previously found on Triton and Mars, in light of the similarity between the dwarf planet and Neptune's largest moon.

"We are pretty close to polar summer - so there is a lot of frost there to sublimate," she pointed out, referring to the process where solid ice skips the liquid phase and turns directly into gas. As the sun's rays hits the surface, they should be powerful enough to penetrate frozen nitrogen, even though Pluto is 32 times farther away from the sun than the Earth.

That would allow the dwarf planets polar cap to trap enough energy to convert some of that ice into pockets of gas, which accumulates pressure until it breaks through the surface. The impact of that blast would send nitrogen ice crystals all over the place, forming the spider-like patterns. Data from New Horizons should be able to prove or disprove this hypothesis.

How to pronounce Pluto's moon Charon

May 1, 2015
John Hopton for redOrbit.com

Let's just get down to it:

Even though it bares the same name as the Greek god Charon, which is pronounced like Karen, but with more emphasis on the -on (Kare-RON), Pluto's moon is pronounced Share-ON, like a frustrated Ozzie Osbourne with diction training.

So why is this so confusing?

Well, according to NASA, the backstory of how it was named goes like this:

"Christy proposed the name Charon after the mythological ferryman who carried souls across the river Acheron, one of the five mythical rivers that surrounded Pluto's underworld. Apart from the mythological connection for this name, Christy chose it because the first four letters also matched the name of his wife, Charlene."

Which is pronounced "Shar-leen". Hence Charon's pronunciation, which is accepted by NASA and most astronomers. (We can't speak for them all.)

"˜Family portrait' captured of Pluto and moons

May 13, 2015
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com - @BednarChuck

NASA's New Horizon probe took time out from analyzing the surface features of Pluto to snap a family portrait of sorts (of at least the family we already know about), capturing the first-ever images of the dwarf planet's smallest and faintest known moons with its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) instrument.

According to Discovery News, the spacecraft was able to create an animated sequence of five 10-second observations from a distance of more than 55 million miles (88 million kilometers). Those pictures showed all five of Pluto's known moons: the largest one, Charon, along with its smaller companions Nix and Hydra and the recently-discovered Styx and Kerberos.

"New Horizons is now on the threshold of discovery," John Spencer, a member of the mission science team member from the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, said in a statement Tuesday. "If the spacecraft observes any additional moons as we get closer to Pluto, they will be worlds that no one has seen before."

Meet the "kids" - i.e. the moons of Pluto

Kerberos and Styx were first discovered in 2011 and 2012, respectively, by members of the New Horizons team using the Hubble Space Telescope. Kerberos orbits between Nix and Hydra, travels around Pluto in 32 days, and is no more than 20 miles in diameter.

On the other hand, Styx's orbit is between those of Charon and Nix, and takes 20 days to make it around the dwarf planet. It is only 4 to 13 miles in diameter. Both moons are between 20 and 30 times fainter and Nix and Hydra, and while Kerberos can be seen in all of the images, Styx is not visible in the first one, as it was obscured by electronic artifacts in the camera.

For the sake of comparison, Discovery News pointed out that Charon is 750 miles wide, Nyx is between 29 and 85 miles wide and Hydra is between 37 and 92 miles wide. The uncertain width of each of these smaller moons should become clearer and the readings more precise as the New Horizons spacecraft draws closer to Pluto's system en route to a July 14 flyby.

"Detecting these tiny moons from a distance of more than 55 million miles is amazing, and a credit to the team that built our LORRI long-range camera and John Spencer's team of moon and ring hunters," New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern from SwRI said in a statement.

****

New Horizons captured these views of Pluto and its moons on April 25, 2015. (NASA)

NASA Pluto Probe May Carry Crowdsourced Message to Aliens

http://www.space.com/29439-pluto-spacecraft-message-to-aliens.html?adbid=10152820640916466&adbpl=fb&adbpr=17610706465&cmpid=514630_20150519_46055806&short_code=30pnm




Voyager 1 Golden Record - Earth's cosmic voices

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpptII291aI&spfreload=10

Pluto and Charon get starring role in first color movie

June 23, 2015
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com - @BednarChuck

The first color movies of Pluto and its moon Charon have been beamed back from NASA's New Horizons probe, and the footage shows the two objects in an unusual orbital dance of sorts, as the moon and the dwarf planet spin around one-another in an interstellar waltz.

According to Popular Science, the images were captured by New Horizons between May 29 and June 3, and the near-true color movies resemble "something out of an 8-bit video game," making it possible for us to get a look at Pluto and Charon in all of their highly-pixilated glory.

The orbital dance that the two bodies are participating in is known as a double planet, and the US space agency explained in a statement that the footage was assembled from images taken in three colors (blue, red, and near-infrared) by New Horizons' Multicolor Visible Imaging Camera.

"It's exciting to see Pluto and Charon in motion and in color," said Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), and principal investigator of the mission. "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."

Footage shows the interstellar waltz from different angles

That mystery is one of many that NASA hopes New Horizons will be able to solve once it makes its closest approach to Pluto on July 14, traveling just 7,800 miles (12,500 kilometers) above the surface of the dwarf planet. As the first mission to the Pluto system and the Kuiper Belt, it should provide new insight into the composition, atmosphere, and moons in the system.

While both movies were created using the same images, they show the Pluto-Charon pair from different perspectives. One depicts the movement of the moon in relation to the planet, making it "Pluto-centric," while the other shows both objects around the shared center of gravity between them and is "barycentric."

The Pluto-centric movie shows the dwarf planet make one turn around its axis every six days, nine hours and 17.6 minutes, the same amount of time in which Charon rotates in its orbit. Also in this footage, viewers can detect regular shifts in Pluto's brightness. The barycentric movie shows that the center, marked by a small "x," is closer to Pluto than Charon because Pluto is far more massive than its moon, NASA explained.

As cool as these new movies are, better things are yet to come from New Horizons.

"Color observations are going to get much, much better, eventually resolving the surfaces of Charon and Pluto at scales of just kilometers. This will help us unravel the nature of their surfaces and the way volatiles transport around their surfaces. I can't wait; it's just a few weeks away!" said Cathy Olkin, New Horizons deputy project scientist.

************

Hubble Finds Pluto's Moons Tumbling in Absolute Chaos

June 3, 2015
Red Orbit

Pluto's moons, you might have a hard time determining when, or from which direction, the sun will rise each day. Comprehensive analysis of data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope shows that two of Pluto's moons, Nix and Hydra, wobble unpredictably. "Hubble has provided a new view of Pluto and its moons revealing a cosmic dance with a chaotic rhythm," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "When the New Horizons spacecraft flies through the Pluto system in July we'll get a chance to see what these moons look like up close and personal." The moons wobble because they're embedded in a gravitational field that shifts constantly. This shift is created by the double planet system of Pluto and Charon as they whirl about each other. Pluto and Charon are called a double planet because they share a common center of gravity located in the space between the bodies. Their variable gravitational field sends the smaller moons tumbling erratically. The effect is strengthened by the football-like, rather than spherical, shape of the moons. Scientists believe it's likely Pluto's other two moons, Kerberos and Styx, are in a similar situation. The astonishing results, found by Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California and Doug Hamilton of the University of Maryland at College Park, will appear in the June 4 issue of the journal Nature. "Prior to the Hubble observations, nobody appreciated the intricate dynamics of the Pluto system," Showalter said. "Our research provides important new constraints on the sequence of events that led to the formation of the system." Showalter also found three of Pluto's moons are presently locked together in resonance, meaning there is a precise ratio for their orbital periods. "If you were sitting on Nix, you would see that Styx orbits Pluto twice for every three orbits made by Hydra," noted Hamilton. Hubble data also reveal the moon Kerberos is as dark as a charcoal briquette, while the other frozen moons are as bright as sand. It was predicted that dust blasted off the moons by meteorite impacts should coat all the moons, giving their surfaces a homogenous look, which makes Kerberos' coloring very surprising. NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which will fly by the Pluto system in July, may help settle the question of the asphalt-black moon, as well as the other oddities uncovered by Hubble. These new discoveries are being used to plan science observations for the New Horizons flyby. The turmoil within the Pluto-Charon system offers insights into how planetary bodies orbiting a double star might behave. For example, NASA's Kepler space observatory has found several planetary systems orbiting double stars. "We are learning chaos may be a common trait of binary systems," Hamilton said. "It might even have consequences for life on planets if found in such systems." Clues to the Pluto commotion first came when astronomers measured variations in the light reflected off Nix and Hydra. Analyzing Hubble images of Pluto taken from 2005 to 2012, scientists compared the unpredictable changes in the moons' brightness to models of spinning bodies in complex gravitational fields. Pluto's moons are believed to have been formed by a collision between the dwarf planet and a similar-sized body early in the history of our solar system. The smashup flung material that consolidated into the family of moons observed around Pluto today. Its binary companion, Charon, is almost half the size of Pluto and was discovered in 1978. Hubble discovered Nix and Hydra in 2005, Kerberos in 2011, and Styx in 2012. These little moons, measuring just tens of miles in diameter, were found during a Hubble search for objects that could be hazards to the New Horizons spacecraft as it passes the dwarf planet in July. Researchers say a combination of Hubble data monitoring and New Horizon's brief close-up look, as well as future observations with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope will help settle many mysteries of the Pluto system. No ground-based telescopes have yet been able to detect the smallest moons. "Pluto will continue to surprise us when New Horizons flies past it in July," Showalter said. "Our work with the Hubble telescope just gives us a foretaste of what's in store." The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., in Washington. (Credit: NASA/ESA/A. Feild [STScI])

CS Monitor

NASA discovers mysterious dark spots on Pluto

NASA's New Horizons mission releases color photos of the lonely dwarf planet, finding different patterns on each face.

By Shontee Pant, Staff writer July 2, 2015   

New color images from NASA's New Horizons mission reveal the two different sides of the planet. (NASA/Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute)   

New color photos of the dwarf planet Pluto were released Wednesday afternoon by NASA's New Horizons mission. The photos reveal a series of dark spots about 300 miles in diameter, something scientists have not seen before.

The mission found the two sides of the planet are distinct from each other; one face is smooth, while the other holds peculiar spots. The dark spots appear to be at the base of the planet in the photos, which is a result of Pluto's tilt; if the planet were aright, the spots would appear to be in the middle of the planet.

"˜It's a real puzzle - we don't know what the spots are, and we can't wait to find out,' said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder in a press release from the mission.

The New Horizons team members were able to create color photographs, which show what Pluto would look like from the perspective of the spaceship, by combining black-and-white images of Pluto and Charon (one of Pluto's moons), from the spacecraft's Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), with lower-resolution color data from the Ralph instrument. The combination of the detail from the black and white photos, with the color enabled the scientists to present an accurate depiction of the two sides of the lonely planetoid.

The New Horizons mission is the first of its kind to explore the icy bodies that are found mostly in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune. It is believed that these planets reflect what other worlds, including Earth, were like before the planets condensed. Scientists hope to sample the chemical clues locked in these frozen tundras to gain a glimpse of what Earth and other planets were like in their primitive years. Exploration of these types of planets was placed on NASA's list of most important missions for this decade, according to the New Horizons press site.

"At least in our lifetimes I don't believe we'll be able to look at exoplanets like we're going to look at Pluto," said Jim Green, who heads NASA's planetary-science division in Washington, to The Christian Science Monitor in April.

The mission also discovered the presence of frozen methane on the planet, which was announced on Wednesday as well, confirming long held theories about the chemical composition of the planet. The race to the planet began in part because of fears that Pluto's atmosphere would freeze to the surface before it could be explored.

However, "˜Pluto's atmosphere is alive and well, and has not frozen out on the surface,' said New Horizons deputy project scientist Leslie Young, Southwest Research Institute, Boulder.

The $700 million mission was launched in 2006, with the goal of returning the first-ever up-close looks at Pluto and its moons. The first color photos of the mission were released in mid-April and came from a distance of 71 million miles from the icy planet. The mission is currently 9.5 million miles away from Pluto and is set to reach the planet for a fly-by on July 14.  

CS Monitor

The lost 81 minutes. Is New Horizons spacecraft ready for Pluto flyby?

NASA lost contact with New Horizons for about 1-1/2 hours on July 4. Its historic rendezvous with Pluto is July 14, giving engineers time to get the probe up and running.

By Mark Sappenfield, Staff writer July 5, 2015   

Just 10 days before it was scheduled to give humanity its first-ever closeup view of Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft went unexpectedly silent.

For 81 minutes on July 4, NASA lost control with its probe. When New Horizons started communicating again, it told mission control that it was in safe mode - in other words, it wasn't doing anything except keeping itself alive while waiting for new instructions from Earth, three billion miles away.

Scientists are trying to figure out what happened, and they must now essentially reboot the craft so it will be fully operational when it hurtles to within 7,800 miles of Pluto on the morning of July 14. It is a daunting task. Each command takes 8.8 hours to carry out - 4.4 hours to transmit to depths of the solar system and another 4.4 hours for New Horizons to transmit its answer back. The process could take days.

But the engineers furiously working to put things right have at least one small comfort: They were made for this.

Between the disappointments of lost spacecraft and the pride of textbook missions is the more-common reality of robotic spaceflight: Something often goes wrong, and NASA needs to pop the hood on a balky piece of machinery from millions of miles away. From Galileo similarly shutting down just hours before it was to make a flyby of Jupiter's volcanic moon, Io, to the Spirit rover temporarily becoming little more than an expensive Martian paperweight, space stuff breaks and - with remarkable ingenuity - NASA fixes it.

NASA engineers are currently trying to figure out what went wrong with New Horizons. But with communication reestablished, they are hopeful that the craft will be in fine working order well before July 14. Some preliminary imaging of Pluto and its moons Charon, Nix, and Hydra will be lost. But the team is not too worried about that.

"We may lose a few appetizers off the planned menu," mission participant Richard Binzel told Sky & Telescope, "but right now the focus is on delivering the main course."

On Thanksgiving Day 1999, "main course" took on an even more poignant meaning. Galileo went into safe mode just as engineers were cutting their turkeys and dipping into their mashed potato. In order to save the Io flyby, they had to manually retype and resend every command sequence - without a single error - so Galileo knew what to do. The original designers had expected the process of rebooting the spacecraft to take a month; the Thanksgiving Day engineers did it in fewer than six hours.

In 2004, just a few weeks after landing, the Spirit rover on Mars began spitting out only random bursts of data. Without any clue what was going on, engineers began to trace Spirit's unintelligible lines of code like bread crumbs, eventually discovering that Spirit sensed a problem with its flash drive and had unsuccessfully attempted to reboot itself more than 60 times to fix it.  Within weeks, the rover was operational.

Indeed, rare is the mission that does not involve some sort of cosmic jerry-rigging. European Space Agency engineers are still working to establish reliable communications between Philae, which landed on a comet in November, and its mothership orbiting the comet. And even the NASA Curiosity rover, which perfectly executed the most thrilling and complicated landing in the history of robotic spaceflight, had a broken arm for several weeks.

As one Spirit engineer told the Monitor in 2004: "A perfect mission is great, but we engineers love jumping on stuff like this. It's exciting to figure it out and make the craft work again."

CS Monitor

New Horizons probe ready for Pluto flyby despite glitch, says NASA

NASA's New Horizons space probe is still on track for its historic flyby of Pluto next week, even after going into 'safe mode' on Saturday following a minor glitch.

By Mike Wall, SPACE.com July 6, 2015   

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will be ready for its epic Pluto flyby next week despite a recent glitch, mission team members say.

New Horizons went into a precautionary "safe mode" on Saturday (July 4) after experiencing an anomaly, but the problem did not turn out to be serious. New Horizons' handlers say the probe should be back to normal science operations by Tuesday (July 7), exactly one week before it performs the first-ever flyby of Pluto.

"The investigation into the anomaly that caused New Horizons to enter 'safe mode' on July 4 has concluded that no hardware or software fault occurred on the spacecraft," mission team members wrote in an update Sunday (July 5). "The underlying cause of the incident was a hard-to-detect timing flaw in the spacecraft command sequence that occurred during an operation to prepare for the close flyby. No similar operations are planned for the remainder of the Pluto encounter."

If New Horizons does indeed bounce back fully as planned on Tuesday, the glitch's effect on the mission's science return will be miminal, team members said.

"In terms of science, it won't change an A-plus even into an A," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in the update.

On July 14, New Horizons will zoom within 7,800 miles (12,500 kilometers) of Pluto, capturing the first up-close looks at the mysterious dwarf planet. During closest approach, the spacecraft should be able to resolve features as small as the ponds in New York City's Central Park, mission officials have said.

"I'm pleased that our mission team quickly identified the problem and assured the health of the spacecraft," Jim Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science division, said in the update. "Now, with Pluto in our sights, we're on the verge of returning to normal operations and going for the gold."

The $700 million New Horizons mission launched in January 2006 and is now nearly 3 billion miles (4.8 billion km) from Earth.

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NASA lost contact with New Horizons over the weekend

July 6, 2015
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com

Just 10 days before it was due to make its closest approach to the dwarf planet Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft suffered what is being called an anomaly on July 4, forcing it to enter safe mode over the weekend while mission engineers worked to diagnose the problem.

According to Forbes and NBC News reports, the $700 million probe experienced a glitch around 2pm Eastern time on Saturday that caused the US space agency to lose contact with it for slightly less than an hour and a half. Mission control personnel were able to regain contact via the NASA Deep Space Network at 3:15 Eastern.

After losing contact with mission scientists on the ground, New Horizons went into autonomous autopilot and switched control from its primary computer to its backup one, coming back online in safe mode and attempting to reinitiate communication with Earth. It then started transmitting telemetry to help the engineers figure out the cause of the problem.

In a statement, NASA said that their investigation into the incident revealed that New Horizons did not experience any hardware or software problems, and that issue was caused by "a hard-to-detect timing flaw in the spacecraft command sequence" that had "occurred during an operation to prepare for the close flyby."

Contact reestablished; science operations to resume Tuesday

Officials at the agency said that no similar operations are planned for the remainder of the Pluto encounter, and that New Horizons was on track to resume normal science operations on Tuesday, July 7. The entire July 14 close-flyby sequence will continue as planned, they added.

"I'm pleased that our mission team quickly identified the problem and assured the health of the spacecraft," noted Jim Green, the Director of Planetary Science at NASA. "Now - with Pluto in our sights - we're on the verge of returning to normal operations and going for the gold."

New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and his colleagues said that the science observations lost during the recovery from the anomaly would have no impact on the mission's primary objectives, and only a minimal effect on the lesser objectives.

"In terms of science, " Stem said, "it won't change an A-plus even into an A."

Currently, New Horizons is roughly six million miles (9.9 million kilometers) from Pluto and is on course for its scheduled flyby, travelling at a speed of more than 30,000 mph (50,000 km per hour) as it draws closer to the dwarf planet and its moons. The spacecraft's instruments will be mapping Pluto's surface, studying its composition and analyzing its atmosphere.

Reaching Pluto, and the End of an Era of Planetary Exploration (New York Times)

Almost Time for Pluto's Close-Up

In a few days, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will zip past the former ninth planet, the first up-close
look of the icy world in the outer solar system.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/07/science/space/almost-time-for-plutos-close-up.html?rref=science/space&module=ArrowsNav&contentCollection=Space%20%26%20Cosmos&action=swipe&region=FixedRight&pgtype=article

New Horizons: Journeying to Pluto and beyond, Part 1

July 8, 2015
David A. Weintraub for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online

Hello Pluto! And Welcome, fellow Earthlings, to the never-before explored Zone Three of our solar system.

The Pluto-Charon system is our window into the final frontier, the last totally unexplored part of our solar system, and we are about to fly through that window and enter Zone Three at 31,000 miles per hour.

The Pluto-Charon system, including the small moons Kerboros, Nix, Styx, and Hydra. (Credit: NASA)

First stop: Zone One

Zone One of our solar system is the zone of the terrestrial, or earthlike planets. Close to the Sun, where we live, we find Mercury, Venus, Earth, the Moon, and Mars, along with Ceres and the other objects in the asteroid belt, like Pallas, Vesta and Juno. All of these are big hunks of rock and iron, and some are planets, while others are moons. Some are asteroids with moons. Some have atmospheres, some don't. They have more in common with each other than with the objects in the rest of the solar system, both because of how they formed and because they are made mostly of rock and metals.

How do they form?

They formed through a collisional process, in which small objects collided with other small objects to make bigger planetesimals. Those planetesimals collided with each other to eventually make ever-larger objects, some of which became planets. The large craters we see most easily on the surfaces of the Moon, Mercury, and Mars testify to this process.

Then internal processes - volcanic activity and plate tectonics, weathering from wind and rain and glacial ice - sculpted and smothered some of the surfaces into what we see today. These objects formed close to the Sun, where the heat of the Sun made collecting the fast-moving gases of hydrogen and helium impossible. Solar heating also ensured that the "ices" of water, ammonia, carbon monoxide, dioxide, and methane were in the form of vapors, not solids, and so they also were difficult for the tiny planets to accrete through collisions.

As a result, the terrestrial zone objects have very little gas and very little "ice" in comparison to outer solar system planets and moons.
zone one

The smaller Zone One along with the much larger Zone Two. (Credit: NASA)

Zone Two: Through gas and ice

Zone Two of our solar system is the zone of the four giant planets and not much else, other than their moon and ring systems. Here, we find the two gas giant planets (made mostly of hydrogen and helium gas), Jupiter and Saturn. Jupiter is more massive than 300 Earths; Saturn is as massive as 95 Earths! We also find two ice giant planets (made mostly of methane, ammonia, and water), Uranus and Neptune.

Though Uranus and Neptune are much smaller than Jupiter and Saturn, they are still enormous in comparison to Earth. Uranus has a mass equivalent to about 15 Earths and Neptune to about 17 Earths. The four giant planets have swept this part of the solar system clean of small stuff because their strong gravitational tug of war makes stable orbits in between any of them impossible.

Gas giant formations

These planets formed through a different process than those in Zone One. First, planetary cores bigger than the Earth formed in the way the Earth itself formed, through collisions. Then, those cores used their strong gravitational pulls to grab and hold onto gases from the great cloud of gas and dust that surrounded them, and by doing so, they grow into giant gas-rich and ice-rich planets and created miniature solar systems around themselves.

Jupiter has four moons that are as big or bigger than Earth's moon and has at least 67 moons, plus a ring system. Saturn has one moon that's nearly as big as Mars, four other moons that are half the size of the Moon, and at least 62 known moons, plus a ring system. Uranus has 6 moderate-sized moons, at least 27 total moons, and a complex system of rings. Neptune has one moon that is about the size of Pluto, another dozen moons, and a handful of rings and ring arcs.

In terms of composition, most of the moons and most of the ring material in all these giant-planet systems are dominated by icy material, not rock. As is evident, Zone Two, the realm of the ices and the giant planets, is completely different from Zone One, the realm of rock, iron, and the terrestrial planets.

What about Zone Three? That's where we're headed.

Zone Three is dominated by the Kuiper Belt, which contains as many as 100,000 worlds. Many of these are dwarf planets like Pluto, Eris, Haumea, MakeMake, and Sedna. Others are smaller, like Quaoar, Orcus, Varuna, Huya, and Ixion. We don't know how they formed or what they are made of, or why they even exist.

Why, just beyond Neptune, at a distance of about 30 times the distance of the Earth from the Sun (30 astronomical units, or 30 AU), does the solar system suddenly change in character? Why, just beyond 30 AU, do we find thousands and thousands of small worlds like Pluto, but no Earths or Neptunes? Why, in fact, do we find any objects at all and not just dust and comets?

Why send a mission to Pluto at all?

Here are a handful of great reasons.

Pluto is the only double planet in our solar system. That is, when we think about moons, we think about objects that are so small in comparison to the planet they orbit that the planet barely notices the moon. But Pluto notices. In fact, Pluto and Charon are an incredible, visual example of two objects both orbiting the center-of-mass of the system, which lies in between the two objects. Such objects are different, but we've never had the chance to study such a system. Until now, of course!

The tides have taken control of the system. Charon orbits in 6.3872 days and spins in 6.3872 days. That's just like Earth's Moon, which both orbits and spins in 27.32 days. But Pluto also spins in 6.3872 days. The Earth doesn't spin in lock-step with the Moon! But Pluto does.

Pluto and Charon are locked into a spin-orbit dance in which they both always show the same hemisphere to each other, just as Earth's Moon always shows a "near side" to the Earth. How different or how similar will Pluto's "near" and "far" sides look?

We already know Pluto has extremely bright and extremely dark regions. Except for Saturn's bizarre moon Iapetus, which itself is one weird puppy, no other object in the solar system does "extreme contrast" better than Pluto. Extreme brightness contrasts (think freshly made snow side-by-side with freshly made volcanic rock) require a dynamic and active combination of atmospheric (weather) and internal (rock-making) processes. Can we discover what is happening on Pluto? Does tiny Pluto still have internal activity, and if so, what powers Pluto?

Pluto's moon Charon shows much less contrast. In fact, except for a polar cap, Charon looks almost monochromatic. Why is Charon so different from Pluto?

Hopefully we'll find out soon.

On July 15, 1965, Mariner 4 flew past Mars and returned the first handful of pictures of Mars to Earth. Now, almost exactly 50 years later, on July 14, 2015, another NASA spacecraft will fly past the last of the planets we knew about in the twentieth century that remains unexplored, opening up the last New Horizon in our solar system.

In half a century, we will have both opened an era of planetary exploration and closed it. The next generation of explorers will return to the planets, as they are returning now to Mars and as they are planning now for a return mission to Jupiter and to Europa. But only once do we get to do something for the very first time, and this is that moment.

What have we learned so far about Pluto from the New Horizons mission? And what is about to happen this weekend? Check back tomorrow for part 2!

LIVE PLUTO FLYBY

Science & Technology / Space ·  Less event details
Date

Wed, Jul 15 2015 5:30 AM - Wed, Jul 15 2015 6:30 AM

About

New Horizons is NASA's first mission to visit the dwarf planet Pluto. Because Pluto is so far from Earth, it has taken nearly 10 years for the spacecraft to reach its destination. It launched on Jan. 19, 2006, swung past Jupiter for a gravity boost in February, 2007, and is headed to Pluto, where it will conduct a reconnaissance flyby study of the dwarf planet and its moons this summer. The spacecraft's closest approach to Pluto occurs on July 14th.

Click here to watch: http://livestream.com/GriffithObservatoryTV/plutoflyby

NASA's New Horizons photo shows Pluto's "˜heart'

International Business Times
09 Jul 2015 at 07:57 ET   

It took NASA's New Horizons more than nine years to travel three billion miles to reach Pluto. And now, when the spacecraft is preparing for its highly anticipated July 14 flyby, a new photo of the dwarf planet, obtained by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) aboard New Horizons, has shown what scientists have never observed before -- Pluto's "heart."

In addition to the prominent elongated dark region, informally known as "the whale," at the equator of Pluto's surface, the new photo also showed a large heart-shaped bright area, which measures nearly 1,200 miles across on the right. The new photo was taken on Tuesday, and is said to be the most detailed photo returned by LORRI so far.

"The next time we see this part of Pluto at closest approach, a portion of this region will be imaged at about 500 times better resolution than we see today," Jeff Moore, of NASA's Ames Research Center, said in a statement on Wednesday.

The new image, which is centered on the area that will be seen from a closer distance during New Horizons' July 14 approach, was captured when the spacecraft was just less than 5 million miles from Pluto. The image was also the first to be received after New Horizons unexpectedly shut down on July 4 due to an anomaly.

Earlier this week, astronomers used images of Pluto taken from June 27 through July 3 to create a map, helping mission scientists to decode the complex pattern of bright and dark spots on Pluto's surface.

Scientists expect to better understand Pluto and its neighborhood when New Horizons will pass within 7,800 miles of the planet's surface next week. The spacecraft is currently less than 4 million miles from Pluto.

New Horizons: Journeying to Pluto and beyond, Part 2

July 9, 2015
David A. Weintraub for redOrbit.com

In case you missed it, check out Part I of this series.

What have we learned so far about Pluto from the New Horizons mission? And what is about to happen this weekend? Let's take a closer look.

Closest approach to Pluto will occur on Tuesday July 14 at about 7:50AM EST (11:49:57 universal time; ~6:50AM CST; ~4:50AM PST). You can follow the countdown clock here: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/.

The New Horizons mission was launched on January 19, 2006, from Cape Canaveral, Florida and received a gravity assist from Jupiter in February of 2007. Now, zipping along at about nine miles per second, the spacecraft could travel from New York City to Los Angeles in less than six minutes. That's eye-popping fast. But Pluto is ridiculously far away. The Earth is a mere 93 million miles from the Sun. Today, Pluto is 32 times that distance, nearly three billion miles from the Sun. Crossing three billion miles is a long slog, even when cruising at nine miles per second. Even as one of the fastest rockets ever made by humans, the journey of New Horizons across the vast expanse of the solar system has taken nine and a half years, and that time doesn't include the time to plan and design the mission and to build the rocket and spacecraft components. For many New Horizons scientists, this mission has consumed their entire adult lives, their entire professional careers. When you watch them at work, when you listen to them in interviews, you can sense their passion. You're almost singed by the fires in their bellies that burns day and night as they work to make sure everything goes right for this final encounter.

Final hazard analyses, rings, and new moons

Over the last two months, some members of the team have been completing final hazard searches. What's this about? They are using the long range imaging camera, LORRI, which is essentially an 8.2-inch diameter telescope with a digital camera attached to it that is designed to operate at extremely cold temperatures, to look for tiny moons and rings that could damage or destroy the spacecraft as it passes through the Pluto-Charon system.

After the discovery of the moons Nix and Hydra in 2005 (by team members Hal Weaver and Stern), Kerberos in 2011 (discovered by a team led by Mark Showalter) and Styx in 2012 (also discovered by a Showalter-led team), all using images obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope, mission principal investigator Alan Stern predicted that the hazard team would discover several more moons as New Horizons closed in on Pluto. The navigation team needs to know where all the moons are and what their orbital paths look like in order to avoid collisions. Surprisingly, no more moons have been uncovered.

In addition, a Pluto occultation on June 29, observed from Earth, did not reveal any ring material. During this occultation, Pluto passed directly in between the Earth and a distant star. During this event, a ring around Pluto would have obscured and thus caused a brief drop in the brightness of the about-to-be-occulted star, just before or after the star passed directly behind Pluto. This is how rings around Uranus were detected for the first time, back in 1977. This is also how rings were detected around some smaller Kuiper Belt objects known as centaurs. Hazard analysis, however, hasn't detected any material that looks like rings. As a result of the last few weeks of hazard analysis, the engineers have been able to put the final touches on the flight sequence commands to time the arrival and the direction for passage of New Horizons into and through the Pluto-Charon system.

This series of images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope shows how the ring system around the planet Uranus appears at ever more oblique (shallower) tilts as viewed from Earth. (Credit: NASA)

The search for rings isn't over, though.

Team members will have one more chance to search for rings when, after passing Pluto, they look back toward the Sun. During our approach to Pluto, we would see the rings in reflected light, as if the ring particles acted like a mirror. When looking back at Pluto, we would see the rings, instead, in "˜forward' scattered light. Some particles, depending on their size, are much better scattering light forward than reflecting light backwards. Good examples of these kinds of particles are those that collect on the windshield of your car. At night, those incredibly tiny particles can very effectively scatter the light from oncoming cars' headlights and create enormous explosions of glare in your windshield.

With enough dust on your windshield, you can be blinded by the glare. Yet, with no oncoming headlights in front of you, you have no problem seeing through your windshield and would never know your windshield was covered with small particles Similarly, if Pluto has a ring composed of tiny particles, the ring may reveal itself better in forward scattered light, after the July 14 encounter.

Pluto is morphing from a distant point of light into a known world. Where once upon a time, that time being last year, all the light from Pluto fell onto a single camera pixel with even the biggest and best telescopes on Earth, by July 1 images of Pluto were 30 pixels across, with each pixel representing a region about 40 kilometers (25 miles) in diameter. At closest approach, the highest resolution images will see details as small as 80 meters across, which is the size of a football field or a small city park or the width of an airplane runway. We will not be able to map the entire surface of Pluto, because New Horizons is simply flying past Pluto, not going into orbit around Pluto. And remember, because one Pluto "˜day' is more than 6 Earth days, when New Horizons flies past Pluto at nine miles per second, it will see only one side of Pluto and have a chance to map, in detail, only one stripe across that one side. But in that one stripe, New Horizons scientists expect to map out some of the surface terrain that is as bright and reflective as any surfaces anywhere else in the solar system and to map out other surface regions that are as dark as the darkest surface regions known anywhere else in the solar system. Will Pluto show an old, densely pockmarked and cratered surface, battered and bruised and scarred by 4.5 billion years of collisional history, like Earth's Moon? Or will it reveal a young surface, freshly resurfaced and polished, like that of Jupiter's moons Europa? Is the weather on Pluto, which some Pluto experts predict sublimates great volumes of "ices" off some parts of the surface and redeposits them as frost on other parts of the surface, active at this time? We will know soon.

We know Pluto has a polar cap, first seen in images captured on April 29.

We also know that Charon has an anti-polar cap. But of what are these polar caps made? Astronomers, for several centuries, knew that Mars had polar caps. Astronomers of the eighteenth and nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries also knew, for sure, that the polar caps of Mars were made of water ice. Why? Because the Earth's polar caps are composed of water ice and so the martian polar caps surely must also be made entirely of water ice. We were wrong. The polar caps of Mars are composed of a spatially large veneer of frozen carbon dioxide which comes and goes, with a permanent underlayer of water ice. Astronomers have wisely reserved judgment on the Plutonian polar caps, though the early betting is on frozen nitrogen, because telescope observations have suggested that Pluto has a thin, nitrogen-dominated atmosphere. But Earth has a nitrogen-dominated atmosphere and does not have frozen-nitrogen polar caps! On the other hand, Mars has a carbon-dioxide dominated atmosphere and does have carbon-dioxide polar caps. The spectrometer on board New Horizons will reveal the contents of the atmosphere and the contents of the polar cap.

Mars' northern polar cap, as it changes size with a change in Martian seasons. In northern summer, the seasonal veneer of frozen carbon dioxide sublimates, leaving behind the permanent water ice cap.

What else will New Horizons do? Check back tomorrow for Part 3!

New Horizons spots whale and donut on Pluto

July 9, 2015
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com - @BednarChuck

The newest images of Pluto collected by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft have revealed yet more unusual-looking features on the dwarf planet, including an elongated dark band called "the whale" and a bright, donut-shaped patch located near this object's "tail."

According to BBC News, the latest images were captured between June 27 and July 3 using the probe's high-resolution black-and-while Lorri instrument and its lower-resolution, color imaging Ralph camera. The features are located along Pluto's equator.

In a statement, New Horizons scientists said the center of the images corresponds to the side of Pluto that will be visible during the spacecraft's flyby of the dwarf planet on Tuesday, July 14. The area known as the whale is one of the darkest regions visible to the probe, and measures some 1,860 miles (3,000 kilometers) in length along the left side of the pictures.

"We're at the "˜man in the moon' stage of viewing Pluto," said John Spencer deputy leader of the Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Colorado. "It's easy to imagine you're seeing familiar shapes in this bizarre collection of light and dark features. However, it's too early to know what these features really are."

Breaking down the features in the latest Pluto images

Located to the right of the whale's "snout" is the brightest region visible on Pluto. This area is approximately 990 miles (1,600 kilometers) across, and could be home to relatively fresh frost deposits, potentially including frozen methane, nitrogen, and/or carbon monoxide.

To the right of the whale are the four mysterious dark spots that have captured the attention of people all over the world, each of which are several hundred miles across. At the left end of the whale is its "tail," which cradles the 200-mile (350 kilometer) long donut-shaped feature.

"At first glance it resembles circular features seen elsewhere in the solar system, from impact craters to volcanoes, but scientists are holding off on making any interpretation of this and other features on Pluto until more detailed images are in hand," the New Horizons team said, adding that higher-resolution images coming up will allow scientists to make more accurate maps of the dwarf planet's surface.

As of Wednesday, New Horizons was less than 4.7 million miles (7.5 million kilometers) from Pluto, according to BBC News. The flyby will take place on the 50th anniversary of the Mariner 4 spacecraft's flyby of Mars, and the new probe will be collecting nearly 5,000 times as much data at Pluto than Mariner did at Mars.

New Horizons: Journeying to Pluto and beyond, Part 3

July 10, 2015
David A. Weintraub for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online

In case you missed them, check out Part I and Part II of this series.

The closest approach to Pluto on the morning of July 14 is the most momentous moment for the New Horizons mission, but that certainly is not the beginning of the mission and it by no means will be the end of the mission.

New Horizons has seven scientific instruments that are designed to collect data quickly and store that data on board for later transmission back to Earth. The data will be quickly stored on two solid-state 8 gigabyte recorders, similar to flash memory cards in digital cameras. Then, slowly but steadily, the data will be relayed back to Earth, via NASA's Deep Space Network's largest (70 meter) antennas. The information will race across the solar system at the speed of light, but nevertheless will take 4 hours to travel from Pluto to Earth, and will do so at a tortoise-like rate of 2,000 bits per second. After 16 months, all the science data from the Pluto encounter will have arrived.

Ralph is the "eyes" of New Horizons. Ralph is a camera with eight different detectors. Seven are CCD detectors, like those found in digital cameras (but better). For of thse are color imagers; the other three are black-and-white panchromatic imagers. The eighth detector is like a CCD, but it works in the infrared.   Ralph's best images will be stereo, in order to measure surface topography, and will have a resolution of 820 feet per pixel. Ralph will be used to study the surface of Pluto and the five known moons, to look for clouds and atmospheric haze, and for rings.

REX is a 3.5-ounce circuit board with electronics that are integrated into the New Horizons telecommunications system. As New Horizons passes Pluto, REX will send radio signals past Pluto through Pluto's tenuous atmosphere in order to measure the structure of Pluto's atmosphere, the average molecular weight of the gas in the atmosphere, and the atmospheric temperature. It will do the same for Charon, though for Charon the experiment is mostly designed to simply determine if Charon even has an atmosphere.

LORRI is the "eagle eyes" of New Horizons, the telescope and camera that have been watching Pluto since January. LORRI will map the "far side" hemisphere of Pluto three days before closest approach; at closest approach, LORRI's spatial resolution will be as small as 70 meters across, giving scientists their best view of the geology of Pluto and Charon.

SWAP is an instrument that is designed to detect the stream of charged particles that flow from the Sun (the solar wind) past Pluto. SWAP will measure how those particles interact with Pluto and are (or are not) disturbed by Pluto. Any particles escaping from Pluto's atmosphere that become charged particles will be swept up by the solar wind, and SWAP should detect them as they get carried away from Pluto.

PEPSSI will measure neutral particles that escape from Pluto's atmosphere. Those particles could be molecules of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, or methane.

SDC is a dust counter, designed and built by students at the University of Colorado at Boulder. SDS is mounted on the outside of the spacecraft and detects collisions of tiny dust particles with the spacecraft, by measuring the mass and speed of the impactor.

Particles of space dust. Grains of dust in space are tiny, typically about the same diameter as a human hair. Dust grains can be made up of many different elements, including carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, silicon, and even water ice. (Credit: NASA)

After passing Pluto, New Horizons will continue into the Kuiper Belt.

Larger Kuiper Belt planets shown in relation to Pluto's relation and the New Horizons' path through the solar system. Credit: NASA, from Pluto Flyby Press Kit (July 2015)

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, the New Horizons team has identified two Kuiper Belt Objects that happen to be close enough to the current spacecraft trajectory that New Horizons could reach one of them in late 2018 or early 2019, using the remaining rocket fuel on board. This autumn, New Horizons will fire its rockets to aim for the most optimal of these targets. Then, if NASA gives the go-ahead to fund a extended mission for a Kuiper Belt Object fly-by, New Horizons will already be on the way to study an object that is one billion miles beyond Pluto. Both potential targets are about 100 kilometers in diameter; a fly-by of either one would allow scientists to study a type of object that has never been explored before.

After that, onward and outward. The spacecraft will probably have power to remain operational into the 2030s, but continuing to invest funds in tracking New Horizons with the Deep Space Network and keep a scientific and engineering team working to keep the spacecraft functioning might not be a wise use of precious resources. Most likely, the Kuiper Belt object fly-by will be the last major scientific work for New Horizons. But what a glorious ride. The total cost of this mission: about $720 million, over the years from 2001 through 2017, or about $2 per person in the United States to make these discoveries, or about 12 cents per year per person over these 17 years. Not a bad way to invest about a dime a year.

David A. Weintraub is a Professor of Astronomy at Vanderbilt University, where he also directs programs in the Communication of Science and Technology and in Scientific Computing. He is an expert in the study of star and planet formation and is the author of three books for popular audiences, including Is Pluto a Planet? (2008), How Old is the Universe? (2012), and Religions and Extraterrestrial Life: How Will We Deal With It? (2014), and nearly one hundred peer-reviewed papers in professional journals.

CS Monitor

New Horizons closes dwarf planet: Is Pluto ready for its close-up

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is about to zip past Pluto at 31,000 miles an hour and just 7,750 miles above the surface. The craft will be taking the most detailed images of the dwarf planet, mapping features as small as a football field.

By Pete Spotts, Staff writer July 12, 2015      

Laurel, Md. - In less than two days, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is set to give humanity its most intimate look yet at Pluto and its moons - a historic flyby that closes one chapter in humanity's efforts to explore the solar system even as it opens another.

Pluto is the last of the solar system's nine classical planets targeted for at least a flyby mission. Indeed, Pluto - now classified as a dwarf planet - and its largest moon Charon make up the solar system's only known binary planet.

But Pluto also is the largest body in the Kuiper Belt, a band of icy objects that extends far beyond Neptune. Thus, Pluto also represents the first encounter with an object at the doorstep of this enigmatic region of the solar system.

The $720-million, don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-it mission is traveling right down the line after a final course adjustment June 29.

"Everything's going great," said Glen Fountain, the mission's project manager at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., on Sunday. The mission's scientists "are really having a great time seeing the data as it comes down."

New Horizons began its formal sequence of flyby observations on July 7, while it was still 5 million miles from the Pluto-Charon system. Now it's closing to within 1 million miles of the system.

One of the mission's three primary goals is to provide detailed color images of Pluto and its moons.

"We're sick of seeing pixelated blobs," says Hal Weaver, the mission's project scientist. "We're going to turn Pluto into a real world with complexity and diversity."

That's already happening. The latest images of Pluto released to date, beamed back on Friday and Saturday, reveal a region of jumbled terrain roughly 1,000 miles long, what appear to be large craters, and three Missouri-size patches of dark material in Pluto's equatorial region. They appear to be linked to a belt of dark material that spans the rest of the equatorial region.

These dark regions may represent complex hydrocarbons that formed as cosmic rays, the sun's ultraviolet radiation, or the solar wind - charged particles constantly streaming from the sun - interacted with nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and methane ices on Pluto's surface, Dr. Weaver suggests.

"It looks like a very rich environment" on Pluto and on Charon, he says.     

The views New Horizons has been delivering so far focus on a different hemisphere than the one the craft will record during Tuesday's closest approach. Beamed back on Saturday, the image revealing the dark patches represents "the last, best look that anyone will have of Pluto's far side for decades to come," noted Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., and the mission's lead scientist, in a statement over the weekend.       

Researchers will combine the black-and-white image, taken while the craft was 2.5 million miles from Pluto, with color images and data on surface composition the craft also has gathered. When combined, these data while help mission scientists reconstruct the geologic history of that hemisphere.

The images are serving as a teaser for the main show, which will last for about 24 hours, centered around the closest encounter at 7:49 A.M. EDT Tuesday.

During the last 12 hours inbound, New Horizons is slated to take ultraviolet measurements of Pluto's atmosphere. It also will take data that will yield topographic maps of Pluto and its moons as well as maps of their surface composition.

The mission's heaviest lifting will come during a half-hour period around closest approach, when New Horizons zips past Pluto at 31,000 miles an hour and some 7,750 miles above the surface. The craft will be taking the most detailed images of Pluto and Charon, mapping features as small as a football field. Mapping the surface composition also will continue and in greater detail.

The second major goal is to characterize Pluto's atmosphere and see if Charon has one. Outbound, the craft is programmed to look back at the Pluto-Charon system using experiments designed to analyze the composition and temperature distribution of Pluto's atmosphere. The science team will use powerful radio signals beamed from Earth to measure these properties in Pluto's lower atmosphere. An ultraviolet spectrometer on New Horizons will take advantage of sunlight to "backlight" the upper atmosphere and reveal its chemical constituents.

These approaches also will be used to see if Charon has an atmosphere. The craft will also use the backlighting from the sun to look for any tenuous rings around the system.

New Horizon's flyby sequence is pre-programmed. Radio signals take 4-1/2 hours to reach the craft and the opportunity to make the measurements is fleeting, rendering useless any attempt on the part of ground controllers to adjust the program on the fly - especially at the rapid-fire pace at which the craft will be operating during closest approach.

The team is confident enough in the craft's performance in executing the commands that cheers and high fives are likely to erupt Tuesday morning, even though controllers will have received no indication of what's happening 3 billion miles away, Dr. Stern noted in a briefing Sunday.

New Horizons' communications antenna is fixed to the craft, so the craft must reorient itself to properly aim the antenna at Earth. Any attempt to communicate with Earth during the flyby's most critical period would mean pulling the instruments off their targets.

So back on Earth, mission controllers will be awaiting a brief burst of telemetry slated to arrive during a 16-minute window Tuesday evening. This burst will contain the only spacecraft-status update controllers will receive during the flyby's most critical period.

"It will be intense," says Alice Bowman, the mission's operations manager at APL, of the wait.

For the first time ever, after a journey of more than 3 billion miles and 9 years, a human-made spacecraft will buzz by Pluto within just 7,800 miles of the surface on July 14, 2015.


And we all know astrologers LOVE Pluto! (Or are just too intimidated to say otherwise.) In any case, we at least love to talk about him. So, to celebrate this historic event, Kepler College is hosting its own Pluto Flyby Party, Tuesday, July 14, at 9 am-12 am EDT/6 am-9 am PDT. And yes, if you sign up but cannot attend, you will receive a copy of the recording.


Our audio simulcast will feature all types of astrologers dropping in to send their best wishes to Pluto and share their favorite Pluto stories while we all tune in to the live NASA webcast. The Kepler College simulcast will be hosted by Kepler's own Enid Newberg and Donna Philosophica host Donna Woodwell.


Astrologer guests stopping by our audio simulcast include:

~ Kathryn Andren
~ Joseph Crane, MA
~ Bill Duvendack
~ Margaret Gray B.A. ESS (TCD), MSW, D. Psych. Astrology
~ Eric Francis
~ Ray Grasse
~ Tom Jacobs
~ Sol Jonassen
~ Rose Marcus
~ Russell von Ohlhausen
~ Samuel F. Reynolds
~ Patricia L. Walsh
~ Donna Woodwell, MA


The closest approach to Pluto is set for 7:49 ET/4:49 PT. We won't be able to see a "live" broadcast from Pluto, since there's a 5-hour time lag to send a data signal back to Earth. (Yes, Pluto is that far away!) Nevertheless NASA will be starting its live press coverage of the historic even with news, interviews and images saved from the preceding days to share with the public.


Links to read more on the historic New Horizons Mission to Pluto:

Official NASA New Horizons
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html

NASA News Coverage of Pluto Flyby
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nasa-announces-television-coverage-media-activities-for-pluto-flyby-300098191.html

What to Expect When You're Expecting a Flyby
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/06240556-what-to-expect-new-horizons-pluto.html

JPL Eyes on Pluto
http://eyes.jpl.nasa.gov/launch2.html?document=$SERVERURL/content/documents/newhorizons/newhorizons.xml

Ray Grasse in the Mountain Astrologer
http://mountainastrologer.com/tma/ready-for-your-close-up-pluto

How well do you know the dwarf planet? Space.com Quiz
http://www.space.com/16537-pluto-quiz-dwarf-planet-moons.html

New Horizons Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aky9FFj4ybE&feature=youtu.be

Oh, Pluto Theme Song
https://youtu.be/ALrHiQnkcpc


Register here for the Pluto Flyby Party:  https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/516280450248761602

New Horizons Probe Finds Out Pluto's Bigger (and Icier) Than We Thought


How large? Based on New Horizons imagery, its diameter is 2,370 kilometers (1,473 miles), plus or minus 20 kilometers (12.4 miles). That makes it almost 30 miles wider than Eris, the dwarf planet whose discovery led to Pluto's downfall as the "ninth planet" back in 2006. Eris' diameter has been measured to be 2,326 kilometers (1,445 miles), plus or minus 12 kilometers (7.5 miles).


Read more:  http://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/new-horizons-probe-finds-out-plutos-bigger-icier-we-thought-n391321

CS Monitor

Why do we love Pluto?

Pluto's distance from Earth endows it with the allure of the mysterious, and its diminutive size gives it the charm of an underdog.

By Calla Cofield, SPACE.com July 13, 2015   

Pluto - the once (and to some people, forever) ninth planet of the solar system - gets a lot of love from the general public. What makes this icy outlier so loveable?

When Pluto's official status in the solar system was changed from "planet" to "dwarf planet," the public outcry was overwhelming. Neil deGrasse Tyson received angry letters from kids who disagreed with the decision, and the majority of people still think Pluto should retain "planet" status.

But people don't just defend Pluto's status; they proclaim their love for it. This body beyond Neptune seems to invoke more love than do the eight - ahem - official planets. Why do people love Pluto? We asked scientists and members of the general public, and this is what they told us.

A mysterious allure

One of the biggest reasons people love Pluto is that "It's mysterious, simple as that. The one planet we know very little about," wrote Facebook user Ashley Helton.

Facebook user Sebastián Alejandro put that sentiment into poetic terms: "As Herman Melville wrote (and the great Carl Sagan once quoted), 'I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas.' Up until now, the outer solar system has been a place forbidden to us because of its remoteness. Pluto embodies a faraway, 'mysterious shore,' and New Horizons is the ship that lets us sail those 'forbidden seas.'"

The New Horizons mission, which will make a close encounter with Pluto tomorrow (July 14), will peel away some of Pluto's mystery. Most notably, the probe will provide the first clear images of Pluto's surface. ("Why do I love Pluto?" wrote Facebook user Anthony Esekhaigbe. "Well, eh, they say love is blind, but now that I'm going to see her, I really want to know why I love her so!")

On Facebook, Mike Appleby wrote, "I was 9 years old when I watched Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. I have always been interested in space exploration. Pluto has sat out there for millions of years by itself. This will all change next week as billions of eyes get a close-up look at it."

Pluto was discovered in 1930, and was long thought to be a lone ice ball at the outer edge of the solar system. In recent decades, scientists have realized that Pluto is actually a member of a huge family of objects that make up the true outer solar system: the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud.

The allure of Pluto's mystery is shared by scientists.

"I think it's fascinating, because it's the furthest planet, it's the furthest object away from us, it's unexplored," Steve Tegler, a professor of physics and astronomy at Northern Arizona University, told Space.com. Tegler is involved with a project looking to determine the composition of ices on the surface of Pluto. "The first time you visit a planet, that doesn't happen very often. That's pretty exciting stuff, to be able to take first images of its surface and to really get underneath and understand dramatically much more about its physical and chemical properties, structural properties.

"To me, I think the fact that it's so far away, it's really at the limit of our ability as a species to get to it, to send something to it. And for me personally, that's what's so interesting about it, is almost everything we know about the universe comes from the analysis of light, whereas we can send spacecraft to objects in the solar system, but [Pluto] is a real stretch. [New Horizons has spent] the better part of a decade in flight, at some of the fastest speeds ever achieved by a spacecraft. We're sort of at the limit of our ability to reach things, to send something there."

Tegler then added, "P.S. Pluto should be a planet, absolutely. Everybody's got a view."

We can tell you that based on people's Facebook comments, Tegler is not alone in his opinion.
Rooting for the underdog

For many years, Pluto's status as the smallest planet in the solar system seems to have inspired love from many people who sympathized with its diminutive stature.

"It was always my favorite 'cause it was the smallest, like me," Tasha Carrion wrote on Facebook. Jon-Paul Premo seconded that feeling, saying, "I'm small, and Pluto is too. Pluto gets me."

Facebook user ISanderson Sanderson wrote, "As the shortest person among all of my friends, I was always fond of tiny Pluto. It's been my favorite planet since I was a wee child and first learned about the planets. Maybe it's the mystery of what it's like, all the way out there at the edge of the solar system, but whatever it is, I've always loved Pluto. I'm so excited that we'll finally get to see what my little friend looks like and learn more about it."

And then there are those people who have their own reasons for loving Pluto. Facebook user Lisa E. Jankowski wrote, "When I was in junior high and high school, I read a lot of sci-fi. Many of the books used Pluto as a base for research and/or military. I find it fascinating. [I'd] love to see the surface."

On Twitter, Patriot Musket (@Patriot_Musket) expressed love for Pluto "Because it's small and cold. Like an ice cube, which reminds me of bourbon."

Astrophysicist Emily Rice (who will be giving a talk about Pluto at the American Museum of natural History in August, and who you can also catch hosting New York City's Astronomy on Tap under the pseudonym "DJ Carly Sagan") said part of the reason she's excited about the New Horizon's mission to Pluto is because of how excited nonscientists are about it.

"I love Pluto because *everyone* loves Pluto!" Rice told Space.com in an email. "Having the data come in from New Horizons in the next couple days is a rare opportunity in science when the research results will go directly into the public consciousness, which makes it especially exciting. Already, each new image of Pluto (and Charon! and the other moons!) is all over the news and social media, thanks to scientists and journalists like Alex Parker & Emily Lakdawalla. ["¦] Today, you can ask anyone on the street, and they'll have an opinion about Pluto - this is what I love about astronomy today!"

Visit Space.com each day this week for the latest news on the Pluto Flyby and New Horizons.

July 14, 2015

Ashes of Pluto discoverer on board New Horizons for historic flyby

by Chuck Bednar
RedOrbit

When NASA's New Horizons completes its historic flyby of Pluto later today, the man who first discovered the now-dwarf planet in 1930 will be there in more than just spirit, as a small amount of the late astronomer's ashes have made the journey along with the spacecraft.

According to CNN.com, American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto 85 years ago when he was just 24 years of age. The Kansas native had been working at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, helping astronomers search for a planet located beyond Neptune by reviewing millions of images, New Horizons team members at Johns Hopkins University said.

Tombaugh's search for a "trans-Neptunian" world came to an end in February 1930, when he caught his first glimpse at what would later be named Pluto. Initially believed to be a planetary oddity because of its small size and unusual elliptical orbit, his work eventually led to the discovery of the Kuiper Belt and the realization that small, icy dwarf planets were common in the Milky Way.

Tombaugh, who died on January 17, 1997 at the age of 90, was the first American to ever find a new planet in the solar system. To honor him, a small aluminum canister containing some of his ashes (donated by his family) was placed on board New Horizons. He is the first man to have his remains launched into interstellar space, according to the mission team.

Posthumously visiting the planet he discovered

The canister containing his ashes is approximately two inches wide and one-half inch tall, and was attached to the inside of the piano-sized spacecraft's upper deck, according to CNN. It also bears an inscription written by Dr. Alan Stern, the head of the New Horizons mission.

The inscription reads: "Interned herein are remains of American Clyde W. Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto and the solar system's "˜third zone.' Adelle and Muron's boy, Patricia's husband, Annette and Alden's father, astronomer, teacher, punster, and friend: Clyde W. Tombaugh (1906-1997)."

On Tuesday, as New Horizons travels to within 7,800 miles (12,500 kilometers) from the surface of the dwarf planet and becomes the first spacecraft to complete a flyby of Pluto, the man who discovered the icy world will be along for the ride - and his family couldn't be happier about it.

"When he looked at Pluto, it was just a speck of light," Tombaugh's daughter Annette said earlier this year, according to CNN. "To actually see the planet that he had discovered and find out more about its atmosphere, find out more of what it is and actually get to see the moons of Pluto, he would have been astounded."

Likewise, back in 2006, his wife Patricia called the gesture "a wonderful tribute."

"Clyde Tombaugh was a grand American, and New Horizons is a grand American adventure," Dr. Stern added at the time. He called Tombaugh's work "a contribution to planetary science that we now know heralded a paradigm shift in our understanding of the geography of our home solar system" and added that it was an "honor... to have launched some of his remains... on the historic mission of exploration that is New Horizons."

July 14, 2015

Hello, Pluto! New Horizons flies by after nearly 10 years

by Brett Smith

Also by Chuck Bednar and Emily Bills

UPDATE 3:50PM CST: New Horizons sends back new images of Pluto, Charon

On Tuesday afternoon, following its successful flyby of Pluto, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has sent back new images of the dwarf planet and its moon Charon that depict both of the objects in exaggerated colors that the US space agency says highlight their compositional diversity.

The new pictures were obtained using three of the color filters of the probe's "Ralph" instrument and were captured on July 13 at 3:38am EDT. The pictures will help scientists better understand the molecular composition of the ice found on the surface of Pluto and Charon, as well as the age of craters and other geologic features and surface changes caused by space weather.

Furthermore, the images show that the so-called "heart" of Pluto consists of two regions made up of remarkably different colors: a western lobe that is similar in shape to an ice-cream cone and is peach-colored in the image, and a bluish area on the right side of the picture. There is also a mid-latitude band that appears in shades ranging from pale blue through red, NASA said.

"These images show that Pluto and Charon are truly complex worlds. There's a whole lot going on here," explained New Horizons co-investigator Will Grundy from the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. "Our surface composition team is working as fast as we can to identify the substances in different regions on Pluto and unravel the processes that put them where they are."

Original story

At 7:49AM EST this morning, NASA's New Horizons probe made its closest pass to Pluto--7,750 miles from the surface of the dwarf planet. (YAY!)

In doing so, it became the first space mission ever to explore a world so far from Earth, officials at the US space agency said. They journey lasted nearly 10 years and spanned about three billion miles, and once the probe re-establishes contact with ground control personnel on Tuesday night, it will begin transmitting data back to Earth - a process that will take 16 months to complete.

"The exploration of Pluto and its moons by New Horizons represents the capstone event to 50 years of planetary exploration by NASA and the United States," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement. "Once again we have achieved a historic first. The United States is the first nation to reach Pluto, and with this mission has completed the initial survey of our solar system, a remarkable accomplishment that no other nation can match."

"New Horizons is the latest in a long line of scientific accomplishments at NASA, including multiple missions orbiting and exploring the surface of Mars in advance of human visits still to come; the remarkable Kepler mission to identify Earth-like planets around stars other than our own; and the DSCOVR satellite that soon will be beaming back images of the whole Earth in near real-time from a vantage point a million miles away," added John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Pluto is not a disappointment

Scientists are expecting data gathered in the flyby to provide a treasure trove of information, as just the approach over the last couple weeks has offered tantalizing clues about the former planet.

The latest images from New Horizons have shown Pluto to be nearly 1,500 miles in diameter, which makes it the largest body in the solar system-circling Kuiper Belt. Probe data also confirmed the existence of a polar ice cap on Pluto, as well as the sizes of three of Pluto's moons.

"Pluto is not disappointing," said New Horizon's principal investigator Alan Stern during a NASA briefing on Monday.

New Horizons measurements confirm it is indeed bigger than Eris, another large planetary body in the Kuiper belt. Data show Pluto is about 28 miles wider than Eris.

"This settles the debate about the largest object in the Kuiper Belt," Stern said.

With Pluto's mass already determined, establishing the dwarf planet's size has allowed scientists to determine it is less dense than previously thought, indicating Pluto may have a very icy interior. Stern stressed this possibility is still under investigation. We do know, however, that it snows on Pluto, according to NASA.

Taking names and taking measurements

New Horizons took measurements of three of Pluto's five known moons. Data confirmed Charon, the largest moon, is 751 miles across. New Horizons also found Nix is about 20 miles wide and Hydra was revealed to be about 30 miles across. Measurements of the other two moons, Kerberos and Styx, were scheduled for Tuesday.

The probe's ALICE instrument, an ultraviolet photo spectrometer, confirmed the presence of a polar ice cap made of methane and nitrogen ice. The pole differs in structure from the dark features around the dwarf planet's equator, and later analyses of a strange dark patch at Charon's north pole will be transmitted back this week, NASA said.

New Horizons discovered nitrogen escaping from Pluto's atmosphere five days ago, much earlier than was expected. The discovery indicates that Pluto may be losing its atmosphere faster than had been thought. One possible explanation for the remote source of nitrogen is that New Horizons made a fortuitous approach, the NASA team said.

Pluto is actually RED

It looks like Mars can't be called the"Red Planet" anymore! NASA expected Pluto to be icy and grey, but it's not. It's red because it's atmosphere contains quantities of methane, nitrogen, and carbon monoxide, and when UV light from the sun gets to Pluto, it interacts with the methane molecules to create a reddish gunk called tholin. The tholin then silts down to the surface to settle, creating the red hue.

CS Monitor

Stunning images of Pluto and Charon: Not just ice balls anymore

Images of Pluto and its largest moon Charon, released Wednesday, show complex worlds with spectacular surface features that rival anything found elsewhere in the solar system.

By Pete Spotts, Staff writer July 15, 2015   

Laurel, Md. - Pluto and Charon are dead; long Live Pluto and Charon.

Gone forever are notions that the main actors in this binary planet system are relatively unremarkable ice balls beyond Neptune, thanks to NASA's New Horizons mission.

Images released today show complex worlds with spectacular surface features that rival anything found elsewhere in the solar system but with their own unique twists:
Recommended: Infographic Space Race, The Sequel: Who is exploring the cosmos today?

"¢ On Pluto, mountain ranges that appear to be built from ultra-hard water ice tens of miles wide vault up to 11,000 feet above the surrounding terrain. For mission scientists, they evoke comparisons with the Rocky Mountains in the western United States. Indeed, the dwarf planet seems to be made largely of water ice, covered by a relatively thin veneer of nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide ices.
Infographic Space Race, The Sequel: Who is exploring the cosmos today?
Photos of the Day Photos of the day 07/15

"¢ On Charon, Pluto's largest moon, canyons up to 4 miles deep are etched across its face, comparable in depth to Valles Marineris on Mars - one of the red planet's most impressive features. Charon also hosts a set of troughs, and cliffs extend for more than 600 miles across the surface.

"¢ On both, evidence suggests that they have had internal heat sources that allowed these bodies to refresh their surfaces within the past 100 million years. For Charon, the evidence comes in the form of an unexpectedly smooth surface, apparently lacking craters. For Pluto, geophysical activity appears to be ongoing.

This represents a fundamental discovery, mission scientists say.

Often, icy bodies that show such geological activity - think Saturn's moon Enceladus, for example - typically are moons orbiting giant planets.

The heat source driving the activity comes from friction inside a moon generated through gravitational interactions with the host planet as well as with any neighboring moons.

"That can't happen on Pluto," says John Spencer, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute and a member of the New Horizons science team. "There is no giant body that can be deforming Pluto on an ongoing, regular basis" to heat its interior.

Charon is too small to do that, he adds.

"This is telling us that you do not need tidal heating to power ongoing recent geological activity on icy worlds," he says. "That's a really important discovery that we just made this morning."

"We've settled the fact that these very small planets can be very active after a long time," added Alan Stern, also with the Southwest Research Institute and the New Horizons mission's lead scientist. "This is going to send a lot of geophysicists back to the drawing board to try to understand how exactly you do that."

The science team offers two potential explanations for the heat needed to produce geological activity: the decay of radioactive elements in a rocky core or the slow freeze-up of a subsurface ocean. The act of freezing releases heat. It also causes water to expand, a force that could have contributed to some of the surface features examined so far.

The notion of a thin veneer of other ices atop water ice also could imply active cryovolcanism on Pluto (the volcanic eruption of volatiles such as water, ammonia, or methane, instead of molten rock), although no evidence for that activity has appeared at this early stage of data analysis.

At the pace Pluto is losing its largely nitrogen atmosphere, over the course of the age of the solar system the planet would have lost the equivalent of a layer of nitrogen ice between 300 meters and 3 kilometers thick.

"If we only see a veneer, what's going on?" Dr. Stern asks. The nitrogen ice on the surface that is the source of the atmosphere's nitrogen needs to be replaced somehow.

"There must be internal activity that is dredging nitrogen up through cryovolcanism or geysers or some other process that's active into the present on this planet," he says.

The combination of majestic mountains of water ice and a thin veneer of other ices "is very strong evidence that will send us looking as we get more and more data across the surface of the close-approach hemisphere to look for evidence of exactly these phenomena," Stern says.

If these processes are still shaping Pluto - the largest object in an extended realm of icy worlds known as the Kuiper Belt, which extends billions of miles beyond Neptune - other Kuiper Belt objects of comparable size could be active as well, the researchers suggest.

Pluto pictures: Nasa reveals first high-resolution images of planet's surface

Mission culminates in images of former ninth planet that show mountain ranges of ice and suggest surface has recently been "˜paved over' by geological activity

Hannah Devlin Science correspondent
Thursday 16 July 2015 08.26 BST
Guardian

For 85 years, it was little more than a featureless grey blob on classroom maps of the solar system. On Wednesday night, Pluto was revealed in high resolution for the first time, revealing dramatic mountain ranges made from solid water ice on a scale to rival the Alps or the Rockies.

The extraordinary images of the former ninth planet and its large moon, Charon, beamed 4 bn miles back to Earth from the New Horizons spacecraft, marks the climax of a mission that has been quietly underway for nearly a decade.

Alan Stern, the mission's principal investigator, described the images as a "home run" for the team. "New Horizons is returning amazing results already. The data look absolutely gorgeous, and Pluto and Charon are just mind blowing."

Adding that one of the biggest surprises was the discovery that "there are mountains in the Kuiper belt", the solar system's mysterious "third zone" where Pluto sits amid around 100,000 smaller icy objects. John Spencer, a mission scientist, said the mountains appear to be around 11,000ft high and several hundred miles across. "These are pretty significant mountains. They'd stand up respectably against mountain ranges on Earth like the Rockies."

The detailed image that fills in one edge of the dwarf planet also revealed not a single crater, hinting that the surface has been recently been "paved over" by geological activity, which could include dramatic geysers blasting plumes of ice into the atmosphere or cryo-volcanoes that erupt in explosions of ice rather than molten rock.

In a nod to Pluto's former status as the ninth planet, until it was downgraded to dwarf planet in 2006, the Nasa press conference began with a rundown of spectacular images of the sun and the eight official planets. "We've brought what was previously a blurred point of light into focus," said Dwayne Brown, Nasa spokesman, as scientists and journalists waited for the image to be unveiled.

Pluto and its moons: detailed new images released - in pictures: View gallery: http://www.theguardian.com/science/gallery/2015/jul/15/pluto-and-its-moons-detailed-new-images-from-new-horizons-released-in-pictures

Stern described the images as "frankly just skimming the surface" of what would be learnt about the planet during the coming year. They have already produced some surprises. Scientists believe the mountains are made from water ice with just a thin veneer of "exotic" ices, methane and nitrogen. "You can't make mountains out of methane and nitrogen," said Spencer.

"Water ice is strong enough to hold up big mountains and that's what we think we're seeing here. This is the first time we've seen this. The methane and nitrogen are just a coating." The mountains on Pluto are likely to have formed no more than 100m years ago - extremely recently given the 4.56 bn-year-old solar system. This suggests the close-up region, which covers about 1% of Pluto's surface, may still be geologically active. The images mark the first time ice mountains have been seen outside of the moons of giant planets, and raises the question of what kind of geological process could be generating the mountainous landscape. Unlike on the moons, tidal forces cannot be involved.

"There is no giant body that can be deforming Pluto on an ongoing regular basis to heat the interior," said Stern. "So this is telling us you don't need tidal heating to power [to produce ice mountains]. This is a really big discovery that we've just made."

The structures, together with the smoothness of Pluto's surface, suggest that recent geological activity is taking place to cause upheaval and smooth over depressions caused by asteroid impacts. Scientists believe this "paving" process could be the result of internal heat that softens rock and ice or from snowfalls that blanket the surface. For scale, the images are so detailed that if the craft were flying over London we would be able to pick out Hyde Park's Serpentine pond or the airport runways at Heathrow.

The distance to Pluto - 5bn km - means it takes New Horizons hours to send back a single picture and it will take 16 months to return all the data it has accumulated during the fly-by, which will include atmospheric data. The team also announced that the heart-shaped feature visible on Pluto will now be known as the Tombaugh Regio, in honour of Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered the dwarf planet in 1930.

The new view of Charon reveals a varied complex terrain. A swath of cliffs and troughs stretching about 600 miles (1,000 km) suggests widespread fracturing of Charon's crust, which could also be the result of geological activity. The image also shows a dramatic canyon estimated to be 4-to-6 miles (7-to-9 km) deep.

Cathy Olkin, a mission scientist, said: "Charon just blew our socks off when we had the new image today. The team has just been abuzz. There is so much interesting science in this one image alone." Pluto is thought to be composed of about two thirds rock encased in a lot of ice, with surface temperatures of about minus 230C. As the £460m mission travels onwards into the Kuiper belt scientists hope that it will open up a window on the ancient solar system and the origins of planets, potentially helping to explain the formation of the Earth itself.

Andrew Coates, the head of planetary science at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, said: "These Kuiper belt objects are the building blocks of the outer solar system. They're all very cold - it's like a cosmic deep freeze. It's the best way of preserving solar system history. That is what is so fascinating about this. It's a really thrilling time for solar system exploration."

Next month, mission scientists will choose which of two objects to visit next. Nasa estimates that the spacecraft will be able to keep recording and transmitting until the mid-2030s. Then its plutonium power source will run out and it will shut down, drifting outwards towards the edge of the solar system and deep space beyond.

Pluto New Horizons mission: what happens next?: Read more.. http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jul/15/pluto-new-horizons-mission-common-questions

New Horizons also observed the smaller members of the Pluto system, which includes four other moons: Nix, Hydra, Styx and Kerberos. A new sneak-peek image of Hydra is the first to reveal its apparent irregular shape and its size, estimated to be about 27-by-20 miles (43-by-33km). "New Horizons is a true mission of exploration showing us why basic scientific research is so important," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for Nasa's Science Mission Directorate.

"The mission has had nine years to build expectations about what we would see during closest approach to Pluto and Charon. Today, we get the first sampling of the scientific treasure collected during those critical moments, and I can tell you it dramatically surpasses those high expectations."

The observations also indicate Hydra's surface is probably coated with water ice. Future images will reveal more clues about the formation of this, and the other moon, billions of years ago. Spectroscopic data from New Horizons' Ralph instruments reveal an abundance of methane ice, but with striking differences among regions across the frozen surface of Pluto.

Click to watch:
<iframe src="https://embed.theguardian.com/embed/video/science/video/2015/jul/15/pluto-surface-high-resolution-images-nasa-new-horizons-video" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

CS Monitor

NASA flyby spies Pluto moon's mountainous moat

In a newly released photo, NASA's New Horizons probe spots a strange sight on Pluto's big moon Charon - a mountain sitting in a moat.

By Mike Wall, Space.com July 16, 2015   

Pluto's big moon Charon keeps getting more and more interesting.

A newly released Charon photo, which was taken by NASA's New Horizons probe during its epic Pluto flyby Tuesday (July 14), reveals a mountain rising out of a big hole on the 750-mile-wide (1,200 kilometers) moon's surface.

The feature, which is visible at the bottom left-hand corner of the inset, is "a large mountain sitting in a moat," Jeff Moore, of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, said in a statement. [See more Pluto photos by New Horizons]
Recommended: Are you a space whiz? Take our quiz!

"This is a feature that has geologists stunned and stumped," added Moore, who leads New Horizons' geology, geophysics and imaging team.

The new image covers an area about 200 miles long (320 km) from top to bottom, NASA officials explained in the statement. New Horizons captured the photo on Tuesday morning from a distance of 49,000 miles (79,000 km).

About 80 minutes later, the spacecraft reached its closest Pluto approach, zooming to within just 7,800 miles (12,500 km) of the dwarf planet's frigid surface. So there will be even better images of Charon - and of Pluto and its other four moons - coming down shortly.

Indeed, NASA will hold a news conference tomorrow (July 17) at 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT) to unveil and discuss the latest photos and discoveries from New Horizons. You can watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA TV.

The $723 million New Horizons mission launched in January 2006 to lift the veil on the Pluto system. The spacecraft gathered reams of data using seven different science instruments during its highly anticipated flyby. It will take up to 16 months for New Horizons to beam all of these observations back to its handlers on Earth.

But the few up-close images analyzed and released so far have revealed Pluto and Charon to be complex and surprising worlds that have been geologically active in the recent past. New Horizons spied 11,000-foot-high (3,500 meters) ice mountains on Pluto, for example, as well as Charon canyons up to 6 miles (10 km) deep.

CS Monitor

Does Pluto have a tail? (+video)

NASA's New Horizons space probe has detected signs of a 'tail' on Pluto, created by the dwarf planet's escaping atmosphere.

By Paul Sutherland, Sen July 19, 2015   

Sen-NASA's New Horizons team revealed fresh findings about Pluto today including a close-up of a vast "cracked" and icy plain and the existence of a tail caused by the escaping atmosphere.

Opening a press conference, Jim Green, director of Planetary Science at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said: "What a historic week!" And the mission's principal investigator Alan Stern said: We've just had the most fun. Pluto's becoming a brand. It sells itself. You don't really have to work that hard!" He added: "I'm a little biased, but I think the Solar System saved the best for last!"

First image shown was a heavily pixellated picture of one of Pluto's tiny moons, Nix. Stern, from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado, said that despite the low resolution, it showed in twice as many pixels as the best Earth-based image of Puto, which was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope.

Another image showed how early measurements have revealed an excess of the gas carbon monoxide over the bright, heart-shaped region. Stern said that no other concentration of the gas anything like that had been detected elsewhere on Pluto.

The bright zone has already been informally labelled Tombaugh Regio, in honour of Clyde Tombaugh who discovered Pluto in 1930. Within it, and north of Pluto's icy mountains, lies a vast plain, devoid of craters, and about 20km (12 miles) wide. Its irregular, polygonal pattern resembles cracks, but the team does not yet know how they formed.

Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team (GGI) at NASA's Ames Research Center, California, told the briefing: The landscape is just astoundingly amazing. Some regions have no craters at all, so obviously younger. It shows that geological processes are happening up to the present time."

He said that the "cracked" region was smooth but had irregularly-shaped segments, troughs, dark material within troughs, pitted surfaces and hills rising above the terrain. The polygons were like you might see on a boiling pot of oatmeal, or in dried mud. Another intriguing feature was a line of smudges, that might be streaks caused by prevailing winds. He said that they might point to active plumes on Pluto, though he cautioned that none had been discovered yet in the early stages of analysis.

The area has been informally dubbed Sputnik Planum, after the Russian satellite that was mankind's first space explorer, it was announced. Another mountainous zone has been called Norgay Montes, in honour of Sherpa Tenzing Norgay who, with Edmund Hillary, became the first men to reach the summit of Mount Everest in 1952. He is the first Nepalese person to have a feature named for him anywhere in the Solar System.

The New Horizons Atmospheres team has observed Pluto's nitrogen-rich atmosphere far beyond its surface. Fran Bagenal, of the University of Colorado, Boulder, estimated that 500 tons of material an hour was escaping from Pluto, compared to just one ton an hour on Mars which has a stronger gravitational pull, and was then being stripped away by the pressure from sunlight. It showed that a substantial amount of Pluto's mountain ice was being removed.

Bagenal said: "What we think is happening is that the solar wind will eventually interact with this escaping atmosphere and may produce a shock upstream." She said that the gas was ionised as it escaped and was producing a "tail" of cold, dense tail stretching as far as 1,600 km (1,000 miles) from the dwarf planet.

A surprise guest at the conference at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Maryland, and a mission collaborator, according to Stern, was Dr Brian May, guitarist with Queen. He said: "It's a thrill to be with you guys. What an amazing achievement. You've inspired the world."

Click to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hsCav2XuQ4

CS Monitor

NASA releases spectacular photos of Pluto moons Nix and Hydra

New photos offer the first up-close look at two of Pluto's satellites.

By Mike Wall, Space.com July 22, 2015   

Two of Pluto's small satellites are getting their moment in the sun.

Newly released photos captured by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft during its historic Pluto flyby on July 14 reveal intriguing new details about Nix and Hydra, two of the dwarf planet's five satellites. For example, Nix is shaped like a jelly bean and bears a curious red patch, while Hydra resembles a big, gray mitten.

The reddish region on Nix also appears to have a bull's-eye pattern, suggesting that it's an impact crater, researchers said. [New Horizons' Pluto Flyby: Complete Coverage]
Recommended: Are you a space whiz? Take our quiz!

"Additional compositional data has already been taken of Nix but is not yet downlinked. It will tell us why this region is redder than its surroundings," New Horizons mission scientist Carly Howett, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement today (July 21).

"This observation is so tantalizing, I'm finding it hard to be patient for more Nix data to be downlinked," she added.

New Horizons snapped the Nix photo from a distance of about 102,000 miles (165,000 kilometers). The image reveals that the satellite is about 26 miles long by 22 miles wide (42 by 36 km), researchers said.

Hydra is a bit bigger, at 34 miles long by 25 miles wide (55 by 40 km), according to the newly released photo, which New Horizons took when the probe was about 143,000 miles (231,000 km) from the mitten-shaped moon.

The Hydra image shows two apparent craters, and suggests that the upper and lower portions of the moon may be made of different stuff, at least on the surface. (In the photo, the upper part of Hydra looks darker than lower regions.)

"Before last week, Hydra was just a faint point of light, so it's a surreal experience to see it become an actual place, as we see its shape, and spot recognizable features on its surface for the first time," mission science collaborator Ted Stryk, of Roane State Community College in Tennessee, said in the same statement.

Pluto's other known moons are Charon, Kerberos and Styx. At 750 miles (1,207 km) in diameter, Charon is more than half as wide as Pluto itself, leading many researchers to regard Pluto-Charon as a binary system. Kerberos and Styx are even smaller than Nix and Hydra.

By mid-October, New Horizons will likely beam home images it took of Kerberos and Styx during the July 14 close encounter, NASA officials said.

It has taken a long time for scientists to take the measure of the Pluto system, which lies about 39 times farther from the sun than Earth does on average. The dwarf planet itself was discovered in 1930, and Charon wasn't spotted until 1978. Nix, Hydra, Kerberos and Styx were all detected by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope between 2005 and 2012.

Researchers, and the rest of humanity, finally got their first up-close look at these far-flung bodies when New Horizons zoomed through the Pluto system on July 14, coming within 7,800 miles (12,500 km) of the dwarf planet's surface.

NASA spacecraft spots second mountain range in Pluto's 'heart'

NASA's New Horizons space probe has imaged a second mountain range inside the heart-shaped feature on Pluto's surface.

By Mike Wall, SPACE.com July 22, 2015   

Pluto has a big heart - big enough to accommodate at least two sets of mountains, a new photo from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft reveals.

New Horizons has spotted a second mountain range inside Tombaugh Regio, the 1,200-mile-wide (2,000 kilometers) heart-shaped feature that mission team members named after Pluto's discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh.

This newfound range rises up to 1 mile (1.6 km) above Pluto's frigid surface, making it comparable in height to the Appalachian Mountains of the eastern United States, NASA officials said. Tombaugh Regio's other known mountain range, by contrast, is more similar to the tall and jagged Rocky Mountains, topping out at more than 2 miles (3.2 km) in elevation.

The newly discovered range lies just west of the ice plains known as Sputnik Planum and is 68 miles (110 km) northwest of the taller mountain range, which mission scientists are calling Norgay Montes after Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, who along with Edmund Hillary completed the first-ever ascent of Mt. Everest, in 1953. (Tombaugh Regio, Norgay Montes and other such names remain informal monikers until they're officially approved by the International Astronomical Union.)

The new photo, which New Horizons captured during its historic Pluto flyby on July 14, shows a startling complexity of terrain within Tombaugh Regio, researchers said.

"There is a pronounced difference in texture between the younger, frozen plains to the east and the dark, heavily cratered terrain to the west," Jeff Moore, leader of New Horizons' geology, geophysics and imaging team, said in a statement today (July 21) upon the photo's release.

"There's a complex interaction going on between the bright and the dark materials that we're still trying to understand," added Moore, who's based at at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

The lack of craters on Sputnik Planum suggests the icy plains are extremely young in geological terms - 100 million years or less, mission team members have said. But the darker terrain to the west is probably several billion years old.

Features as small as 0.5 miles (0.8 km) wide are visible in the new photo, which New Horizons took from a distance of 48,000 miles (77,000 km). But the spacecraft zoomed to within just 7,800 miles (12,500 km) of Pluto's surface on July 14, so even more spectacular images of the dwarf planet should be coming down to Earth in the future.

All of New Horizons' close-approach data should be in researchers' hands in compressed form by the end of 2015, while it may take another year to get the complete flyby dataset down to Earth, team members have said.

CS Monitor

Pluto: lofty haze, flowing ice, 'a dream come true'

Fresh data from New Horizons show smooth icy landscapes feathering into ancient, cratered terrains, providing signs of geological activity that could still be under way.

By Pete Spotts, Staff writer July 24, 2015   

New images from NASA's New Horizons mission to the Pluto-Charon system reveal that a vast icy plain, first seen in detail last week, sports glacier-like ice streams that spill into craters and encircle water-ice mountains - including a new range comparable in height to the Appalachian Mountains on Earth.

At the same time, close-ups of the dark equatorial region reveal a crater-pocked landscape within a portion of the region the team has dubbed Cthulhu Regio.

The contrasting landscape underscores Pluto's unexpected complexity, revealed when the New Horizons spacecraft swooped to within 7,800 miles of the dwarf planet's surface on July 14.

Even though portions of Pluto's surface show signs of geological activity that still could be underway today, "some parts of Pluto are fundamentally ancient," said William McKinnon, a planetary geophysicist at Washington University in St. Louis and a member of the New Horizons science team, during a briefing Friday.

"Pluto has a very complicated story to tell," added the mission's lead scientist, Alan Stern, with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. "There is a lot of work we need to do to understand this very complicated place."

So far, New Horizons has beamed back to data-hungry scientists only about 4 to 5 percent of the observations the craft's suite of seven instruments gathered during the historic flyby.

As if to underscore the level of patience the mission demands, from now to mid-September most of the data the craft is scheduled to return will focus on engineering information, although a smattering of science data will come with it. Once these data are in hand, the science spigot will reopen with a vengeance and flow for about a year.

Much of the new information focused on Pluto's big heart, which the team has informally named Tombaugh Regio. It's east and west lobes are strikingly different, Dr. Stern said. Ice deposits on the eastern lobe, as well as those that appear to be flowing out of the region's southern tip, look much thinner than those to the west, suggesting that the the western lobe is the source for the icy veneer covering geological features to the east and south.

A Texas-sized patch of this western lobe, Sputnik Planum, hosts the broad, polygon-shaped ice patches that look like garden pavers, revealed on June 17. But on the planum's northern and southern boundaries, these features appear to be flowing.

To the north, the ice buts up against what the team interprets as scarps leading to higher terrain. Researchers have detected what look to be ice streams flowing up to, then along, the scarp faces. In one location, nitrogen ice appears to be flowing into an ancient crater an impactor punched into the edge of the highlands. Its entry point appears to be a gap that erosion cut into the crater rim.

At Pluto's surface temperature of about minus 390 degrees Fahrenheit, water ice would be extremely hard and brittle. But ices of nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide "are soft and malleable, even at Pluto conditions," Dr. McKinnon said. "They will flow."

Researchers have known for years that Pluto's surface contained nitrogen ice, he noted.

"But to see evidence for recent geological activity is simply a dream come true," he added.

Sputnik Planum's smooth appearance, devoid of any impact craters, "tells us that this is a really a young unit," probably no older than a few tens of millions of years, McKinnon said. Based on modeling estimates of the heat coming from Pluto's interior - at temperatures still frigid by terrestrial standards - "there's no reason why this stuff cannot be going on today."

To the south, the ice appears to be flowing around mountains, including the new range the team has informally named Hillary Montes and feathering itself across lower elevations that make up Cthulhu Regio.

New Horizons also delivered surprises about Pluto's atmosphere, and confirmed that if Charon has one, it is exceedingly tenuous.

Regarding Pluto's atmosphere, New Horizons' data "are basically changing the way we think about Pluto's atmosphere," said Michael Summers, a researcher at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and another member of the New Horizons science team. "We're basically having to start from scratch."

Looking back at Pluto as it headed away from the planet and deeper into the Kuiper Belt, New Horizons revealed that the planet's haze - light scattered off of particles in the atmosphere - extended far higher than models had predicted. The haze also revealed a distinct structure to the atmosphere and even provided hints of weather features on Pluto, Dr. Summers noted.

The evidence for weather appears in layers of haze, one about 30 miles above the surface and the other some 50 miles high. The team also saw features that looked to some like waves.

Ultimately, the haze extends up to 80 miles above the surface, where atmospheric temperatures are relatively warm. Up there, the heat triggers reactions between methane and other molecules that form tiny, complex-hyrdocarbon particles known as tholins, which grow heavy enough to fall back to Pluto's surface. Previously, researchers thought that the tholins would form lower in the atmosphere, where temperatures are colder. These tholins are ruddy particles, thought to be responsible for Pluto's reddish tint.

Tholins also are likely to be responsible for the apparently ice-free equatorial region's distinctively dark regions - tholins baked by what, for Pluto, would be its tropical sun.

In addition, the atmosphere appears to be have flipped a switch, losing about half its mass in the past two years.

"That's pretty astonishing to an atmospheric scientist," Summer said.

Pluto has entered a stage in its orbit where it is heading away from the sun. Indeed, when the mission was still being evaluated by the planetary-science community, "there was a real interest in trying to get to Pluto while it still had a substantial atmosphere," Stern said. "We wanted to get there while there was still an atmosphere to study."

But between 1989 and two years ago, the atmosphere seemed stable, despite Pluto's outbound course. This led some to suggest that maybe the atmosphere doesn't collapse at Pluto heads toward its most distant point from the sun.

New Horizons appears to have detected what could be the first stages of that collapse, just as New Horizons arrived, Stern said.

"It would be an amazing coincidence, but there are some on our team who would say: I told you so," he said. "We'll see if this is, in fact, what's happening or if it's a more-complicated story."

CS Monitor

Astounding New Horizons photos reveal Pluto's atmosphere, surface

Spectacular new photos snapped by NASA's New Horizons space probe reveal flowing ices and a hazy atmosphere.

By Calla Cofield, SPACE.com July 27, 2015      

Stunning new images of Pluto by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft show flowing ices, a complicated surface covered in mountain ranges and a surprisingly far-reaching atmosphere. 

At a news conference today (July 24), members of the New Horizons team spoke about the incredible new science being pulled from data collected by the probe, which performed history's first flyby of Pluto on July 14. Among other findings, scientists announced big surprises in the study of Pluto's atmosphere, as well as the discovery of what appear to be flowing fields of ice in Pluto's "heart."

"Pluto has a very complicated story to tell," Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons, said at the news conference. "There is a lot of work that we need to do to understand this very complicated place."

Photos of Pluto and Its Moons: http://www.space.com/11431-photos-pluto-charon-moons-dwarf-planet.html

One of the new images released today is a gorgeous global view showing half of Pluto's surface, lit by sunlight, with the heart-shaped region informally known as Tombaugh Regio in the lower-left quadrant. The new image shows features on the surface as small as 1.4 miles (2.2 kilometers), or twice the resolution of a similar image released on July 13.

The image shows Pluto's surface in "true color," or as it would appear to the human eye. It combines data from New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) and Ralph instruments.

Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, appear together in a new, "true color" portrait that highlights the reddish hue of Pluto compared to Charon's gray tone. Scientists think Pluto's red color is the result of particles created in its atmosphere, through methane's interaction with UV light. The particles stick together, growing heavier, and eventually rain down on the surface.

On the other hand, new observations of Charon suggest that it has "much less atmosphere than Pluto, if any," Stern said. The probe will send back more data on Charon's atmosphere in September.

"For now, all that we can say is, it's a much more rarefied atmosphere [than Pluto's]," Stern said. "It may be that there's a thin nitrogen layer in the atmosphere, or methane, or some other constituent. But it must be very tenuous compared to Pluto - again, emphasizing just how different these two objects are despite their close association in space."

In a stunning image taken from beyond the far side of Pluto, in which the dwarf planet eclipses the sun, scientists can see a haze in the Plutonian atmosphere.

Click to view: http://www.space.com/18564-pluto-atmosphere.html

"This is one of our first images of Pluto's atmosphere. [It] stunned the encounter team," said Michael Summers, a New Horizons co-investigator based at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, at today's news conference. "For 25 years, we've known that Pluto has an atmosphere. But it's been known by numbers. This is our first picture. This is the first time we've really seen it. This was the image that almost brought tears to the eyes of the atmospheric scientists on our team."

The haze is created by the particles that scientists think eventually fall to the surface and give Pluto its reddish hue. The haze extends at least 100 miles (160 km) above the surface of Pluto, or five times higher than models predicted, according to Summers, who called the discovery "a big surprise." Scientists previously thought the upper layers of the atmosphere would be too warm for hazes to form, he said.

"We're going to need some new ideas to figure out what's going on," Summers said in a statement from NASA.

In another set of new images, scientists revealed what appears to be a wide field of glaciers flowing across Pluto's surface. The flowing ice field is easily spotted in images of the dwarf planet: It's the smooth, light-colored upper-left lobe of the heart-shaped region - an area unofficially known as Sputnik Planum.

Fly Over Pluto's Hillary Mountains and Sputnik Plain (Video): http://www.space.com/30045-fly-over-pluto-s-hillary-mountains-and-sputnik-plain-video.html

Scientists think that, unlike glaciers on Earth, the ice in Sputnik Planum is made of nitrogen, carbon monoxide and methane. At the frigid temperature of about minus 390 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 235 Celsius), water ice "won't move anywhere," because it is too rigid and brittle to flow, said Bill McKinnon, of Washington University in St. Louis, deputy leader of the New Horizons geology, geophysics and imaging team.

But even at such low temperatures, nitrogen, carbon dioxide and methane ices are "geologically soft and malleable," McKinnon said. At the news conference, McKinnon showed regions near the heart-shaped region's upper-left edge where the ice could be seen creeping around other geologic barriers and filling in craters. The images, he said, show "conclusive evidence" of ice flow that may still be happening on Pluto's surface today.

"To see evidence of recent geological activity is simply a dream come true," McKinnon said. "The appearance of this terrain, the utter lack of impact craters on Sputnik Planum, tells us that this is really a young unit."

McKinnon also noted another interesting finding that has surfaced from the New Horizons data: Pluto is very close to being perfectly spherical.

"We actually can't detect any obliqueness or out-of-roundness in the body," McKinnon said. Many other bodies in the solar system have distortions to their roundness, which "tells you about their history," he said.

"Pluto was probably spinning very, very fast after what we believe to be a giant impact that led to the formation of [Charon]," McKinnon added, noting that the gravitational pull of the two bodies on each other would have, over time, slowed down Pluto's rapid rotation.

The New Horizons space probe made its closest approach to Pluto on July 14. The entire data set that it collected during its flyby of the dwarf planet will take 16 months to download back to Earth. The wide variety of features on Pluto's surface poses many questions that will keep scientists busy for years to come, mission team members have said.

See Pluto's frozen 'heart' in amazing detail

NASA has stitched together a new false-color image from photos snapped by its New Horizons space probe during its historic flyby of the dwarf planet Pluto.

By Tariq Malik
SPACE.com July 28, 2015   

The mysterious face of Pluto is beginning to yield some of its secrets in this stunning false-color image from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which scientists can use to detect subtle differences in the dwarf planet's surface, including its icy "heart."

The new image of Pluto, released on Thursday (July 23), clearly shows the now familiar heart-shaped region nicknamed Tombaugh Regio. The photo is actually a combination of observations from the main camera on New Horizons (called LORRI) and the probe's visible/infrared imager (known as Ralph) which provided data for the colors in the view. The enhanced colors allow scientists to identify differences in the composition and texture of Pluto's surface, according to a NASA image description.

"The 'heart of the heart,' Sputnik Planum, is suggestive of a source region of ices,'" NASA officials wrote in the image description. Sputnik Planum is the vast plains region inside Pluto's heart-shaped feature. "The two bluish-white 'lobes' that extend to the southwest and northeast of the 'heart' may represent exotic ices being transported away from Sputnik Planum."

The New Horizons spacecraft captured this view in the days leading up to its historic July 14 flyby of Pluto.At the time, New Horizons was about 280,000 miles (450,000 kilometers) from the dwarf planet. Four images from the probe's LORRI camera (short for Longe Range Reconnaissance Imager) were combined with the color data from the Ralph instrument to create this view.

Pluto's heart-shaped region was named Tombaugh Region in honor of the late astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930 while working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.

NASA will unveil more new photos of Pluto from New Horizons later today at 2 p.m. EDT (1800 GMT) during a press conference at its headquarters in Washington, D.C. You can watch the Pluto webcast live on Space.com, courtesy of NASA TV.