The 2016 launch window for Mars missions is fast approaching along with opposition, and ESA is refining its target window for ExoMars. Mars launch season offers the optimal time to make the trip from Earth to Mars, as missions prepare to break the surly bonds and head towards the Red Planet next spring. NASA’s InSight lander will also make the trip.
ExoMars is the first joint European Space Agency (ESA) Roscosmos mission to the Red Planet. The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter is under contract to Thales Alenia Space, and the EDM stationary lander dubbed Schiaparelli after the 19th century Italian astronomer is being constructed by Airbus Defense and Space. This would be Russia’s first successful Mars lander mission for over a dozen tries if successful.
The ExoMars project is a two-part mission, and will culminate in an ExoMars rover in 2018. The key objective for the Trace Gas Orbiter, lander and rover to follow in 2018 is to seek out the controversial source of methane on Mars. A product of biology—think bovine flatulence—on Earth, researchers have proposed various sources—inorganic and otherwise—as a source of the anomalous methane seen in the Martian atmosphere. The Trace Gas Orbiter will remain on-station in orbit through 2018 to relay communications from the ExoMars rover. The Entry, Descent and Landing Demonstrator Module Schiaparelli will demonstrate key technologies for landing, including a hybrid Buck Rodgers fins-first style retro-rocket landing reminiscent of Viking, along with a deformable underside meant to absorb impact.
The landing with be a dramatic one on Meridiani Planum at the expected height of dust storm season, and we may get some interesting footage from the onboard descent camera. Along with weather and atmospheric measurements, the EDM Lander will also make the first electrical field measurements from the surface of Mars.
Unfortunately, EDM’s life will be short; Roscosmos originally intended to supply a 100-watt plutonium-powered RTG for the lander, but later opted due to export control to use an on-board battery. The EDM’s lifespan will be measured in a few days, at best.
Heading to Mars in 2016
An issue related to two propulsion system sensors aboard the EDM Lander recently prompted mission planners to opt for a launch for ExoMars at the end of the window next year, with liftoff set for March 14th atop a Proton rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan instead of January, as originally intended. NASA’s Mars InSight will depart Earth for the Red Planet just ten days earlier on March 4th from Vandenberg AFB in a rare dramatic night shot of an Atlas 5 rocket deploying an interplanetary mission from the US West Coast. InSight’s primary objective is to study seismic activity and the Martian interior, and will land in one of four selected sites (1 primary and 3 backup) in Elysium Planitia on September 28th, 2016.
Naturally, ESA and Roscomos are taking every precaution to assure the success of ExoMars and EDM. The 2011 failure of Phobos-Grunt highlighted the perils of tempting the ‘Great Martian Ghoul’ with more tasty spacecraft. Space is hard, and landing on Mars even more so.
Opposition 2016 for Mars occurs on May 22nd, 2016. Mars is always high in the early morning sky a few months prior to opposition, presenting an optimal window to send spacecraft to the Red Planet on the most efficient in trajectory in terms of fuel and time. This 3-month wide window comes around every 26 months leading up to opposition season. Oppositions of Mars are now getting more favorable, and the next opposition after 2016 in 2018 will be nearly as favorable as the historic 2003 event.
Our robots are swiftly colonizing Mars on our behalf. Here’s a Who’s Who scorecard of functioning spacecraft. On the surface: NASA’s Opportunity and Mars Curiosity rovers. In orbit: Mars Odyssey, (Since 2001!) Mars Express, HiRISE, India’s Mars Orbiter, and MAVEN. Add the ExoMars 2016 and 2018 missions, InSight and the Mars 2020 rover for NASA, and we’ve truly established a redundant sort of ‘telepresence’ on and around Mars.
Will the EDM Lander become the first successful non-NASA lander to approach the Red Planet? Keep an eye on the Insight and the first of two ExoMars missions, as Earth invades Mars in 2016!
Eclipse tetrads of doom. Mars, now bigger than the Full Moon each August. The killer asteroid of the month that isn’t. Amazing Moons of all stripes, Super, Blood, Black and Blue…
The internet never lets reality get in the way of a good meme, that’s for sure. Here’s another one we’ve caught in the wild this past summer, one that now appears to be looking for a tenuous referent to grab onto again next week.
You can’t miss Jupiter homing in on Venus this month, for a close 61.5’ pass on the morning on Oct 25th. -1.4 magnitude Jupiter shows a 33” disk on Sunday’s pass, versus -4 magnitude Venus’ 24” disk.
We also had a close pass on July 1st, which prompted calls of ‘the closest passage of Venus and Jupiter for the century/millennia/ever!’ (spoiler alert: it wasn’t) Many also extended this to ‘A Star of Bethlehem convergence’ which, again, set the web a-twittering.
Will the two brightest planets in the sky soon converge every October, in the minds of Internet hopefuls?
This idea seems to come around every close pass of Jupiter and Venus as of late, and may culminate next year, when an extra close 4’ pass occurs on August 27th, 2016. But the truth is, close passes of Venus and Jupiter are fairly common, occurring 1-2 times a year. Venus never strays more than 47 degrees from the Sun, and Jupiter moves roughly one astronomical constellation eastward every Earth year.
Much of the discussion in astrological circles stems from the grouping of Jupiter, Venus and the bright star Regulus this month. Yes, this bears a resemblance to a grouping of the same seen in dawn skies on August 12th, 2 BCE. This was part of a series of Jupiter-Venus conjunctions that also occurred on May 24th, 3 BCE and June 17th, 1 BCE. The 2 BCE event was located in the constellation Leo the Lion, and Regulus rules the sign of kings in the minds of many…
But even triple groupings are far from uncommon over long time scales. Pairings of Jupiter, Venus in any given zodiac constellation come back around every 11-12 years. Many great astronomical minds over the centuries have gone broke trying to link ‘The Star’ seen by the Magi to the latest astronomical object in vogue, from conjunctions, to comets, to supernovae and more. If there’s any astronomical basis to the allegorical tale, we’ll probably never truly know.
“The 3/2 BCE conjunctions don’t fit the time of Jesus’ birth. There is also no evidence that these sorts of conjunctions were considered all that good; I even found evidence that they were bad news for a king, especially if Jupiter was circling around Regulus. And of course, none of this even comes close to doing the things the Star of Bethlehem was claimed to have done.
So, we have a not terribly rare situation in the sky that conforms to something that doesn’t really fit the Gospel story in a time frame that doesn’t fit the Jesus chronology which doesn’t really have anything all that auspicious about that to ancient observers.”
The dance of the planets also gives us a brief opening teaser on Saturday morning, as Mars passes just 0.38 degrees NNE of Jupiter on Oct 17th looking like a fifth pseudo-moon.
Finally, the crescent Moon joins the scene once again on November 7th, passing 1.9 degrees SSW of Jupiter and 1.2 SSW of Venus, a great time to attempt to spy both in the daytime using the crescent Moon as a guide. And keep an eye on Venus, as the next passage of the crescent Moon on December 7th features a close grouping with binocular Comet C/2013 US10 Catalina as well.
How close can the two planets get?
Stick around ‘til November 22nd 2065, and you can watch Venus actually transit the face of Jupiter:
Though rare, such an occlusion involving the two brightest planets happens every other century or so… we ran a brief simulation, and uncovered 11 such events over the next three millennia:
Bruce McCurdy of the Royal Canadian Astronomical Society posed a further challenge: how often does Venus fully occult Jupiter? We ran a simulation covering 9000 BC to 9000 AD, and found no such occurrence, though the July 14th, 4517 AD meeting of Jupiter and Venus is close.
Let’s see, I’ll be on my 3rd cyborg body, in the post- Robot Apocalypse by then…
This sort of total occlusion of Jupiter by Venus turns out to be rarer than any biblical conjunction. Why?
Well, for one thing, Venus is generally smaller in apparent size than Jupiter. When Jupiter is near Venus, it’s also near the Sun and in the 30-35” size range. Venus only breaks 30” in size for about 20% of its 584 synodic period. But we suspect a larger cycle may be in play, keeping the occurrence of a large Venus meeting and covering a shrunken Jove in our current epoch.
Astronomy makes us ponder the weirdness of our skies gracing our backyard over stupendously long time scales. Whatever your take on the tale and the modern hype, be sure to get out and enjoy the real show on Sunday morning October 25th, as the brightest of planets make for a brilliant pairing.
Researchers at the University of Washington’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory have devised a new habitability index for judging how suitable alien planets might be for life, and the top prospects on their list are an Earthlike world called Kepler-442b and a yet-to-be confirmed planet known as KOI 3456.02.
Those worlds both score higher than our own planet on the index: 0.955 for KOI 3456.02 and 0.836 for Kepler-442b, compared with 0.829 for Earth and 0.422 for Mars. The point of the exercise is to help scientists prioritize future targets for close-ups from NASA’s yet-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope and other instruments.
Astronomers have detected more than 1,000 confirmed planets and almost 5,000 candidates beyond our solar system, with most of them found by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. More than 100 of those have been characterized as potentially habitable, and hundreds more are thought to be waiting in the wings. The Webb telescope is expected to start taking a closer look soon after its scheduled launch in 2018.
“Basically, we’ve devised a way to take all the observational data that are available and develop a prioritization scheme,” UW astronomer Rory Barnes said Monday in a news release, “so that as we move into a time when there are hundreds of targets available, we might be able to say, ‘OK, that’s the one we want to start with.'”
This isn’t the first habitability index to be devised. Traditionally, astronomers focus on how close a particular exoplanet’s mass is to Earth’s, and whether its orbit is in a “Goldilocks zone” where water could exist in liquid form. But in a paper accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, Barnes and his colleagues say their scheme includes other factors such as a planet’s estimated rockiness and the eccentricity of its orbit.
The formula could be tweaked even further in the future. “The power of the habitability index will grow as we learn more about exoplanets from both observations and theory,” said study co-author Victoria Meadows.
Highest resolution mosaic of ‘Tombaugh Regio’ shows the heart-shaped region on Pluto focusing on ice flows and plains of ‘Sputnik Planum’ at top and icy mountain ranges of ‘Hillary Montes’ and ‘Norgay Montes’ below. This new mosaic combines the seven highest resolution images captured by NASA’s New Horizons LORRI imager during history making closest approach flyby on July 14, 2015. Inset at right shows global view of Pluto with location of mosaic and huge heart-shaped region in context. Annotated with place names. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI/ Marco Di Lorenzo/Ken Kremer/kenkremer.com
Unannotated version below[/caption]
Now the last explored planetary system in our solar system is being revealed for the first time in history to human eyes, piece by piece, in the form of the highest resolution flyover mosaics and movies of the alien surface ever available, now and for decades to come.
With the resoundingly successful close flyby completed and the piano shaped New Horizons probe now looking in the rear view mirror, the scientific booty is raining down on receivers back on Earth. However it will take about 16 months to send all the flyby science data back to Earth due to limited bandwidth.
The first series of seven breathtaking high resolution surface images focusing on Pluto’s bright heart-shaped region, informally named ‘Tombaugh Regio’, has been stitched together into our new and wider view mosaic, shown above and below, by the image processing team of Marco Di Lorenzo and Ken Kremer.
Furthermore the New Horizons team has created a spectacular simulated flyover movie centered in the heart of Pluto’s huge ‘Heart’ at ‘Tombaugh Regio’, showing the stunning views including the incredibly recent ice flows and plains of ‘Sputnik Planum’ and monumental icy mountain ranges of ‘Norgay Montes’ and newly discovered ‘Hillary Montes.’
The mosaic and movie are compiled from the seven highest resolution images captured by NASA’s New Horizons LORRI imager during the history making closest approach flyby.
The LORRI images were taken from a distance of 48,000 miles (77,000 kilometers) from the surface of the planet about 1.5 hours prior to the closest approach at 7:49 a.m. EDT on July 14. The images easily resolve structures smaller than a mile across.
New Horizon’s unveiled Pluto as a surprising vibrant and geologically active “icy world of wonders” as it barreled past the Pluto-Charon double planet system on July 14 at over 31,000 mph (49,600 kph) and collected unprecedented high resolution imagery and spectral measurements of the utterly alien worlds.
The newly-discovered mountain range has been informally named Hillary Montes (Hillary Mountains) for Sir Edmund Hillary, who first summited Mount Everest with Tenzing Norgay in 1953. They rise about one mile (1.6 kilometers) above the surrounding plains, similar to the height of the Appalachian Mountains in the United States.
They are located nearby and somewhat north of another mountain range discovered first and named Norgay Montes (Norgay Mountains).
“For many years, we referred to Pluto as the Everest of planetary exploration,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado.
“It’s fitting that the two climbers who first summited Earth’s highest mountain, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, now have their names on this new Everest.”
Watch this flyover above Pluto’s icy plains at Sputnik Planum and Hillary Montes:
Video caption: This simulated flyover of two regions on Pluto, northwestern Sputnik Planum (Sputnik Plain) and Hillary Montes (Hillary Mountains), was created from New Horizons close-approach images. Sputnik Planum has been informally named for Earth’s first artificial satellite, launched in 1957. Hillary Montes have been informally named for Sir Edmund Hillary, one of the first two humans to reach the summit of Mount Everest in 1953. The images were acquired by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on July 14 from a distance of 48,000 miles (77,000 kilometers). Features as small as one-half mile (1 kilometer) across are visible. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
The LORRI images show “extensive evidence of exotic ices flowing across Pluto’s surface and revealing signs of recent geologic activity, something scientists hoped to find but didn’t expect.”
Sputnik Planum is a Texas-sized plain, which lies on the western, left half of Pluto’s bilobed and bright heart-shaped feature, known as Tombaugh Regio.
The new imagery and spectral evidence from the Ralph instrument appears to show the flow of nitrogen ices in geologically recent times across a vast region. They appear to flow similar to glaciers on Earth. There are also carbon monoxide and methane ices mixed in with the water ices.
“At Pluto’s temperatures of minus-390 degrees Fahrenheit, these ices can flow like a glacier,” said Bill McKinnon, deputy leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team at Washington University in St. Louis.
“In the southernmost region of the heart, adjacent to the dark equatorial region, it appears that ancient, heavily-cratered terrain has been invaded by much newer icy deposits.”
“We see the flow of viscous ice that looks like glacial flow.”
As of today, July 26, New Horizons is 12 days past the Pluto flyby and already over 15 million kilometers beyond Pluto and continuing its journey into the Kuiper Belt, the third realm of worlds in our solar system.
New Horizons discovered that Pluto is the largest known body beyond Neptune – and thus reigns as the “King of the Kuiper Belt!”
The science team plans to target New Horizons to fly by another smaller Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) as soon as 2018.
Watch for Ken’s continuing coverage of the Pluto flyby. He was onsite reporting live on the flyby and media briefings for Universe Today from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), in Laurel, Md.
Stay tuned here for Ken’s continuing Earth and planetary science and human spaceflight news.
Spectacular imagery of huge regions of flowing ice, monumental mountain ranges and a breathtakingly backlit atmospheric haze showing Pluto as we’ve never seen it before, were among the newest discoveries announced today, July 24, by scientists leading NASA’s New Horizons mission which sped past the planet for humanity’s first ever up-close encounter only last week.
New Horizon’s revealed Pluto be an unexpectedly vibrant “icy world of wonders” as it barreled by the Pluto-Charondouble planet system last Tuesday, July 14, at over 31,000 mph (49,600 kph).
“The images of Pluto are spectacular,” said John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, at today’s media briefing.
Over 50 gigabits of data were collected during the encounter and flyby periods of the highest scientific activity in the most critical hours before and after the spacecrafts closest approach to Pluto, its largest moon Charon and its quartet of smaller moons.
Data from the flyby is now raining back to Earth, but slowly due to limited bandwidth of an average “downlink” of only about 2 kilobits per second via its two transmitters.
“So far we’ve seen only about 5% of the encounter data,” said Jim Green, director of Planetary Science at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
At that pace it will take about 16 months to send all the flyby science data back to Earth.
Among the top highlights is the first view ever taken from the back side of Pluto, a backlit view that humans have never seen before.
It shows a global portrait of the planets extended atmosphere and was captured when NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft was about 1.25 million miles (2 million kilometers) from Pluto. It shows structures as small as 12 miles across.
“The silhouette of Pluto taken after the flyby and show a remarkable haze of light representing the hazy worlds extended atmosphere,” Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, said at the media briefing.
“The image is the equivalent of the Apollo astronauts Earth-rise images.”
“It’s the first image of Pluto’s atmosphere!” said Michael Summers, New Horizons co-investigator at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, at the briefing.
“We’ve known about the atmosphere for over 25 years,” and now we can see it. There are haze layers and it shows structure and weather. There are two distinct layers of haze. One at about 30 miles (50 kilometers) and another at about 50 miles (80 kilometers) above the surface.”
“The haze extend out about 100 miles! Which is five times more than expected.”
The image was taken by New Horizons’ high resolution Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) while looking back at Pluto, barely seven hours after closest approach at 7:49 a.m. EDT on July 14, and gives significant clues about the atmosphere’s dynamics and interaction with the surface. It captures sunlight streaming through the atmosphere.
“The hazes detected in this image are a key element in creating the complex hydrocarbon compounds that give Pluto’s surface its reddish hue.”
Methane (CH4) in the upper atmosphere break down by interaction of UV radiation and forms ethylene and acetylene which leads to more complex hydrocarbons known as tholins – which the team says is responsible for Pluto’s remarkable reddish hue.
The team also released new LORRI images showing “extensive evidence of exotic ices flowing across Pluto’s surface and revealing signs of recent geologic activity, something scientists hoped to find but didn’t expect.”
The images focuses on Sputnik Planum, a Texas-sized plain, which lies on the western, left half of Pluto’s bilobed and bright heart-shaped feature, known as Tombaugh Regio.
New imagery and spectral evidence from the Ralph instrument was presented that appears to show the flow of nitrogen ices in geologically recent times across a vast region. They appear to flow similar to glaciers on Earth. There are also carbon monoxide and methane ices mixed in with the water ices.
“We’ve only seen surfaces like this on active worlds like Earth and Mars,” said mission co-investigator John Spencer of SwRI. “I’m really smiling.”
“At Pluto’s temperatures of minus-390 degrees Fahrenheit, these ices can flow like a glacier,” said Bill McKinnon, deputy leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team at Washington University in St. Louis.
“In the southernmost region of the heart, adjacent to the dark equatorial region, it appears that ancient, heavily-cratered terrain has been invaded by much newer icy deposits.”
“We see the flow of viscous ice that looks like glacial flow.”
If the spacecraft remains healthy as expected, the science team plans to target New Horizons to fly by another smaller Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) as soon as 2018.
Watch for Ken’s continuing coverage of the Pluto flyby. He was onsite reporting live on the flyby and media briefings for Universe Today from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), in Laurel, Md.
Stay tuned here for Ken’s continuing Earth and planetary science and human spaceflight news.
Scientists say NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has discovered Earth’s “older, bigger first cousin” – a planet that’s about 60 percent bigger than our own, circling a sunlike star in an orbit that could sustain liquid water and perhaps life.
“Today, Earth is a little bit less lonely, because there’s a new kid on the block,” Kepler data analysis lead Jon Jenkins, a computer scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, said Thursday during a NASA teleconference about the find.
The alien world, known as Kepler-452b, is about 1,400 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus – too far away to reach unless somebody perfects interstellar transporters. But its discovery raises the bar yet again in the search for Earth 2.0, which is a big part of Kepler’s mission.
Jenkins said that Kepler-452b has a better than even chance of being a rocky planet (though there’s some question about that). Its size implies that it’s about five times as massive as Earth. He said the planet might be cloudier than Earth and volcanically active, based on geological modeling. Visiting Earthlings would weigh twice as much as they did on Earth – until they walked around for a few weeks and “lost some serious pounds,” he joked.
The planet is about 5 percent farther from its parent star than Earth is from our sun, with a year that lasts 385 days. Its sun is 10 percent bigger and 20 percent brighter than our sun, with the same classification as a G2 dwarf. But Kepler-452b’s star is older than our 4.6 billion-year-old home star – which suggests the cosmic conditions for life could be long-lasting.
“It’s simply awe-inspiring to consider that this planet has spent 6 billion years in the habitable zone of its star, which is longer than the age of the Earth,” Jenkins said. Models for planetary development suggest that Kepler-452b would experience an increasing warming trend and perhaps a runaway greenhouse effect as it aged, he said.
Kepler-452b’s advantages trump the mission’s earlier planetary discoveries. One involved a rocky planet, just a little bigger than Earth, that was found in its parent star’s habitable zone – that is, the kind of orbit where liquid water could exist. But that star, known as Kepler-186, is a shrunken red dwarf rather than a close analog to the sun.
Kepler research scientist Jeff Coughlin said it’s not clear how hospitable a planet circling a red dwarf might be. A rocky planet in the right orbit around a sunlike star is a surer bet. “We’re here on Earth, we know there’s life here,” he said.
Scientists said Kepler-452b is on the target list for the SETI Institute’s search for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, using the Allen Telescope Array in California – but no alien detection has been reported. “So far, the 452b-ians have been coy,” Seth Shostak, the institute’s senior astronomer and director of the Center for SETI Research, told Universe Today in an email.
John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for science, characterized the newly announced planet as the “closest twin” to Earth discovered so far. However, he said further analysis of the Kepler data may turn up even closer relatives.
Launched in 2009, Kepler detects alien worlds by looking for the faint dimming of a star as a planet crosses its disk. The SUV-sized telescope has spotted more than 4,600 planet candidates.
So far, about 1,000 of those have been confirmed as planets using other methods, ranging from detecting their parent stars’ Doppler shifts to carefully measuring the time intervals between the passages of planets. For Kepler-452b, scientists used ground-based observations and computer models to estimate the mass and confirm the detection to a level of 99.76 percent, Jenkins said.
The findings were due to be published online Thursday by the Astrophysical Journal, Jenkins said. In addition to Kepler-452b, another 521 planet candidates have been added to the mission’s checklist – including 12 candidates that appear to be one to two times as wide as Earth and orbit in their parent stars’ habitable zones. Nine of the stars are similar to our own sun in size and temperature, NASA said in a news release.
There’s sure to be more to come. In 2013, Kepler was crippled by failures of its fine-pointing navigation system, but it returned to its planet-hunting mission last year, thanks to some clever tweaking that makes use of the solar wind as an extra stabilizer. “It’s kind of the best-worst thing that ever happened to Kepler,” Jenkins said.
APPLIED PHYSICS LABORATORY, LAUREL, MD – The highest resolution images ever taken of Pluto by humanity’s first spacecraft ever to visit the last planet in our solar system revealed unanticipated new discoveries of ice mountains as tall as the Rockies and vast craterless plains spanning hundreds of miles (kilometers) across – are now shown in our newly created context mosaic (featured above and below) of the heart-shaped ‘Tombaugh Regio’ area that dominates the alien planet’s surface.
This first high resolution surface mosaic was created from a newly unveiled series of black and white images centered in the Heart of Pluto’s huge ‘Heart, including the ice mountains of ‘Sputnik Planum’ and icy plains of ‘Norgay Montes.’
They were captured by New Horizons’ high resolution Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on July 14 as the probe barreled past the Pluto-Charon binary planet system only four days ago on Tuesday, July 14, at over 31,000 mph (49,600 kph).
These highest resolution LORRI images focused on the “Heart of the Heart” of Pluto have now been stitched into a mosaic by the image processing team of Marco Di Lorenzo and Ken Kremer.
Pluto’s bright heart-shaped region has now been informally renamed “Tombaugh Regio,’ announced John Spencer, New Horizons science team co-investigator at the post flyby media briefing on July 15.
The mosaic of Pluto’s ‘Tombaugh Regio’ is based on the initial imagery released so far as of July 17.
A pair of high resolution LORRI images was aimed at areas now informally named Norgay Montes (Norgay Mountains) and Sputnik Planum (Sputnik Plain).
Norgay Montes is informally named for Tenzing Norgay, one of the first two humans to reach the summit of Mount Everest, along with Sir Edmund Hillary. Sputnik Planum is informally named for Earth’s first artificial satellite launched by the Soviet Union in 1957.
The two LORRI images are draped over a wider, lower resolution view of Tombaugh Regio – in annotated and unannotated versions. This is highest resolution currently available.
To the left of the mosaic are two small inserts showing possible “wind streaks” say the researchers.
To the right of the mosaic is a global view of Pluto showing the location of Tombaugh Regio and also outlined to show the precise location of the high resolution LORRI mosaic.
The LORRI images were taken from a distance of 48,000 miles (77,000 kilometers) from the surface of the planet about 1.5 hours prior to the closest approach at 7:49 a.m. EDT on July 14. The images easily resolve structures smaller than a mile across.
The frozen region of Norgay Montes is situated north of Pluto’s icy mountain range at Sputnik Planum.
“This terrain is not easy to explain,” said Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team (GGI) at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.
“The discovery of vast, craterless, very young plains on Pluto exceeds all pre-flyby expectations.”
“The landscape is astoundingly amazing. There are a few ancient impact craters on Pluto. But other areas like “Tombaugh Regio” show no craters. The landform change processes are occurring into current geologic times.”
“There are no impact craters in a frozen area north of Pluto’s icy mountains we are now informally calling ‘Sputnik Planum’ after Earth’s first artificial satellite.”
‘Sputnik Planum’ is composed of a broken surface of irregularly-shaped segments. The polygonal shaped areas are roughly 12 miles (20 kilometers) across, bordered by what appear to be shallow troughs based on a quick look at the data.
The mountain ranges height rival those of the Rockies, says Moore.
The new LORRI close-ups show the icy mountain range has peaks jutting as high as 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) above the surface, announced John Spencer, New Horizons science team co-investigator at the media briefing.
“It’s a very young surface, probably formed less than 100 million years old,’ said Spencer. “It may be active now.”
“Judging from the absence of impact craters, it’s clear that Sputnik Planum couldn’t possibly be more than 100 million years old, and possibly is still being shaped to this day by geologic processes,” noted Moore. “This could be only a week old for all we know.”
During the fast flyby encounter, the New Horizons spacecraft pointed its suite of seven science instruments exclusively on all the bodies in the Pluto system, to maximize the capture of scientific data, as quickly as possible, and store it onto its two solid state digital recorders for later playback.
A major challenge for the mission is the rather slow “downlink” transmission of data back to Mission Control on Earth. Since the average “downlink” is only about 2 kilobits per second via its two transmitters, it will take about 16 months to send all the flyby data back to Earth.
Therefore the team has carefully selected just a few of the highest resolution images and other key instrument data for quick playback. The remaining flyby data will be prioritized for streaming.
“Over 50 gigabits of data were collected during the encounter and flyby periods,” New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado, said during the July 17 media briefing.
“So far less than 1 gigabit of data has been returned.”
New Horizons discovered that Pluto is the biggest object in the outer solar system and thus the ‘King of the Kuiper Belt’.
The Kuiper Belt comprises the third and outermost region of worlds in our solar system.
If the spacecraft remains healthy as expected, the science team plans to target New Horizons to fly by another smaller Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) as soon as 2018.
Watch for Ken’s continuing coverage of the Pluto flyby. He was onsite reporting live on the flyby and media briefings for Universe Today from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), in Laurel, Md.
Stay tuned here for Ken’s continuing Earth and planetary science and human spaceflight news.
This annotated view of a portion of Pluto’s Sputnik Planum (Sputnik Plain), named for Earth’s first artificial satellite, shows an array of enigmatic features. The surface appears to be divided into irregularly shaped segments that are ringed by narrow troughs, some of which contain darker materials. Features that appear to be groups of mounds and fields of small pits are also visible. This image was acquired by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on July 14 from a distance of 48,000 miles (77,000 kilometers). Features as small as a half-mile (1 kilometer) across are visible. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI
See 3 image mosaic below[/caption]
The jaw dropping new imagery of young plains of water ice was publicly released today, July 17, by NASA and scientists leading the New Horizons mission during a media briefing, and has already resulted in ground breaking new scientific discoveries at the last planet in our solar system to be visited by a spacecraft from Earth.
“We have now visited every planet in our solar system with American spacecraft,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. “These findings are already causing us to rethink the dynamics of interior geologic processes.”
New data and dazzling imagery are now from streaming back some 3 billion miles across interplanetary space to mission control on Earth and researchers eagerly awaiting the fruits of more than two decades of hard labor to get to this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
“I can’t wait for the new discoveries!” exclaimed Bolden at today’s media briefing.
“Over 50 gigabits of data were collected during the encounter and flyby periods,” New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado, said during the media briefing.
“So far less than 1 gigabit of data has been returned.”
It will take some 16 months for all the Pluto flyby data to be transmitted back to Earth.
And the team has not been disappointed because the results so far shows Pluto to possess tremendously varied terrain that “far exceed our expectations.”
Video Caption: In the center left of Pluto’s vast heart-shaped feature – informally named “Tombaugh Regio” – lies a vast, craterless plain that appears to be no more than 100 million years old, and is possibly still being shaped by geologic processes. This frozen region is north of Pluto’s icy mountains and has been informally named Sputnik Planum (Sputnik Plain), after Earth’s first artificial satellite. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI
Two new high resolution images captured by the probes Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on July 14 were released today and taken from a distance of 48,000 miles (77,000 kilometers). Features as small as one-half mile (1 kilometer) across are visible in the images – shown above and below.
They were snapped from frozen region lying north of Pluto’s icy mountains, in the center-left of the heart feature, informally named “Tombaugh Regio” (Tombaugh Region) after Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930.
“This terrain is not easy to explain,” said Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team (GGI) at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.
“The discovery of vast, craterless, very young plains on Pluto exceeds all pre-flyby expectations.”
“The landscape is astounding. There are a few ancient impact craters on Pluto. But other areas like “Tombaugh Regio” show no craters. The landform change processes are occurring into current geologic times.”
“There are no impact craters in a frozen area north of Pluto’s icy mountains we are now informally calling ‘Sputnik Planum’ after Earth’s first artificial satellite.”
‘Sputnik Planum’ is composed of a broken surface of irregularly-shaped segments. The polygonal shaped areas are roughly 12 miles (20 kilometers) across, bordered by what appear to be shallow troughs based on a quick look at the data.
Notably, some of the clumps are filled with mysterious darker material. Hills are also visible in some areas, which may have been pushed up. Etched areas on the surface may have been formed by sublimation process where the water ice turns directly from the solid to the gas phase due to the extremely negligible atmosphere pressure.
In some places there are also streaks that may have formed from windblown processes and pitted areas.
“It’s just pure coincidence that we got the highest resolution data at Sputnik Planum which is of the most interest scientifically,” Moore noted.
Moore indicated that the team is working on a pair of theories as to how these polygonal segments were formed.
“The irregular shapes may be the result of the contraction of surface materials, similar to what happens when mud dries. Alternatively, they may be a product of convection, similar to wax rising in a lava lamp. On Pluto, convection would occur within a surface layer of frozen carbon monoxide, methane and nitrogen, driven by the scant warmth of Pluto’s interior,” Moore explained.
Pluto’s polygons look remarkably similar to the Martian polygons upon which NASA’s Phoenix lander touched down on in 2008 and dug into. Perhaps they were formed by similar mechanisms or difference ones, contraction or convection, Moore told me during the briefing.
As of yesterday, New Horizons spacecraft completed and exited the Pluto encounter phase, said Stern. “We are now collecting departure science.”
New Horizons is already over 3 million miles beyond Pluto and heading to its next yet to be determined target in the Kuiper Belt.
“With the flyby in the rearview mirror, a decade-long journey to Pluto is over –but, the science payoff is only beginning,” said Jim Green, director of Planetary Science at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
“Data from New Horizons will continue to fuel discovery for years to come.”
Stay tuned here for Ken’s continuing Earth and planetary science and human spaceflight news.
Measurements by New Horizons gathered just in the past few days as the spacecraft barrels towards the Pluto planetary system now confirm that Pluto is indeed the biggest object in the vast region beyond the orbit of Neptune known as the Kuiper Belt.
Pluto is thus the undisputed King of the Kuiper Belt!
Pluto measures 1,473 miles (2,370 kilometers) in diameter, which is at the higher end of the range of previous estimates.
The big news was announced today, by New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado, during a live media briefing at Pluto mission control at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.
“This settles the debate about the largest object in the Kuiper Belt,” Stern noted.
New Horizons will swoop to within about 12,500 kilometers (nearly 7,750 miles) of Pluto’s surface and about 17,900 miles (28,800 kilometers) from Charon during closest approach at approximately 7:49 a.m. EDT (11:49 UTC) on July 14.
The new and definitive measurement of Pluto’s size is based on images taken by the high resolution Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) to make this determination.
“The size of Pluto has been debated since its discovery in 1930. We are excited to finally lay this question to rest,” said mission scientist Bill McKinnon, Washington University, St. Louis.
Pluto was the first planet discovered by an American, Clyde Tombaugh.
Pluto is bigger than Eris, another big Kuiper Belt object discovered in 2005 by Mike Brown of Caltech, which is much further out from the Sun than Pluto. The discovery of Eris further fueled the controversial debate about the status of Pluto’s planethood.
Eris comes in second in size in the Kuiper Belt at only 1,445 miles (2,326 km) in diameter.
Stern also noted that because Pluto is slight bigger than the average of previous estimates, its density is slightly lower than previously thought. Therefore the fraction of ice in its interior is slightly higher and the fraction of rock is slightly lower. But further data is required to pin the density down more precisely.
The uncertainty in Pluto’s size has persisted for decades and was due to the fact that Pluto has a very tenuous atmosphere composed of nitrogen.
Furthermore Pluto’s lowest atmospheric layer called the troposphere, is shallower than previously believed.
On the other hand, its largest moon Charon with which it forms a double planet, lacks a substantial atmosphere and its size was known with near certainty based on ground-based telescopic observation.
New Horizons LORRI imagery has confirmed that Charon measures 751 miles (1208 km) kilometers) across.
Stern also confirmed that frigid Pluto also has a polar cap composed of methane and nitrogen ices based on measurements from the Alice instrument.
LORRI has also zoomed in on two of Pluto’s smaller moons, Nix and Hydra.
“We knew from the time we designed our flyby that we would only be able to study the small moons in detail for just a few days before closest approach,” said Stern. “Now, deep inside Pluto’s sphere of influence, that time has come.”
But because they are so small, accurate measurement with LORRI could only be made in the final week prior to the July 14 flyby.
Nix is estimated to be about 20 miles (about 35 kilometers) across, while Hydra is roughly 30 miles (roughly 45 kilometers) across. These sizes lead mission scientists to conclude that their surfaces are quite bright, possibly due to the presence of ice.
Determinations about Pluto’s two smallest moons, Kerberos and Styx, will be made later at some point during the 16-month long playback of data after the July 14 encounter.
It has been three decades since we last visited planetary bodies at the outer reaches of our solar system when Voyager 2 flew past Uranus and Neptune in 1986 and 1989.
New Horizons is closing in fast on its quarry at a whopping 31,000 mph (49,600 kph) after a nine year interplanetary voyage and is now less than half a million miles away, in the final hours before closest approach.
The New Frontiers spacecraft was built by a team led by Stern and included researchers from SwRI and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. APL also operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission.
Watch for Ken’s continuing onsite coverage of the Pluto flyby on July 14 from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL).
Stay tuned here for Ken’s continuing Earth and planetary science and human spaceflight news.
‘Here be Dragons…’ read the inscriptions of old maps used by early seafaring explorers. Such maps were crude, and often wildly inaccurate.
The same could be said for our very understanding of distant planetary surfaces today. But this week, we’ll be filling in one of those ‘terra incognita’ labels, as New Horizons conducts humanity’s very first reconnaissance of Pluto and its moons.
The closest approach for New Horizons is set for Tuesday, July 14th at 11:49 UT/7:49 AM EDT, as the intrepid spacecraft passes 12,600 kilometres (7,800 miles) from Pluto’s surface. At over 4 light hours or nearly 32 astronomical units (AUs) away, New Horizons is on its own, and must perform its complex pirouette through the Pluto system as it cruises by at over 14 kilometres (8 miles) a second.
This also means that we’ll be hearing relatively little from the spacecraft on flyby day, as it can’t waste precious time pointing its main dish back at the Earth. With a downlink rate of 2 kilobits a second—think ye ole 1990’s dial-up, plus frozen molasses—it’ll take months to finish off data retrieval post flyby. A great place to watch a simulation of the flyby ‘live’ is JPL’s Eyes on the Solar System, along with who is talking to New Horizons currently on the Deep Space Network with DSN Now.
Bob King also wrote up an excellent timeline of New Horizons events for Universe Today yesterday. Also be sure to check out the Planetary Society’s in-depth look at what to expect by Emily Lakdawalla.
Seems strange that after more than a decade of recycling the same blurry images and artist’s conceptions in articles, we’re now getting a new and improved shot of Pluto and Charon daily!
To follow the tale of Pluto is to know the story of modern planetary astronomy. Discovered in 1930 by American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh from the Lowell Observatory, Pluto was named by 11-year old Venetia Burney. Venetia just passed away in 2009, and there’s a great short documentary interview with her entitled Naming Pluto.
Fun fact: Historians at the Carnegie Institute recently found images of Pluto on glass plates… dated 1925, from five years before its discovery.
Despite the pop culture reference, Pluto was not named after the Disney dog, but after the Roman god of the underworld. Pluto the dog was not named in Disney features until late 1930, and if anything, the character was more than likely named after the buzz surrounding the newest planet on the block.
We’re already seeing features on Pluto and Charon in the latest images, such as the ‘heart,’ ‘donut,’ and the ‘whale’ of Pluto, along with chasms, craters and a dark patch on Charon. The conspicuous lack of large craters on Pluto suggests an active world.
The International Astronomical Union (IAU) convention for naming any new moons discovered in the Plutonian system specifies characters related to the Roman god Pluto and tales of the underworld.
With features, however, cartographers of Pluto should get a bit more flexibility. Earlier this year, the Our Pluto campaign invited the public to cast votes to name features on Pluto and Charon related to famous scientists, explorers and more. The themes of ‘fictional explorers and vessels’ has, of course, garnered much public interest, and Star Trek’s Mr. Spock and the Firefly vessel Serenity may yet be memorialized on Charon. Certainly, it would be a fitting tribute to the late Leonard Nimoy. We’d like to see Clyde Tombaugh and Venetia Burney paid homage to on Pluto as well.
We’ve even proposed the discovery of a new moon be named after the mythological underworld character Alecto, complete with a Greek ‘ct’ spelling to honor Clyde Tombaugh.
The discovery and naming of Charon in 1978 by astronomer Robert Christy set a similar precedent. Christy choose the name of the mythological boatman who plied the river Styx (which also later became a Plutonian moon) as it included his wife Charlene’s nickname ‘Char.’ This shibboleth also set up a minor modern controversy as to the exact pronunciation of Charon, as the mythological character is pronounced with a hard ‘k’ sound, but most folks (including NASA) say the moon as ‘Sharon’ in keeping with Christy’s in-joke that slipped past the IAU.
And speaking of Pluto’s large moon, someone did rise to the occasion and take our ‘Charon challenge,’ we posed during the ongoing Pluto opposition season recently. Check out this amazing capture of the +17th magnitude moon winking in and out of view next to Pluto courtesy of Wendy Clark:
Clark used the 17” iTelescope astrograph located at Siding Spring Observatory in Australia to tease out the possible capture of the itinerant moon.
Great job!
What’s in a name? What strange and wonderful discoveries await New Horizons this week? We should get our very first signal back tomorrow night, as New Horizons ‘phones home’ with its message that it survived the journey around 9:10 PM EDT/1:10 UT. Expect this following Wednesday—in the words of New Horizons principal Investigator Alan Stern—to begin “raining data,” as the phase of interpreting and evaluating information begins.
And there’s more in store, as the New Horizons team will make the decision to maneuver the spacecraft for a rendezvous with a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) next month. Said KBO flyby will occur in the 2019-2020 timeframe, and perhaps, we’ll one day see a Pluto orbiter mission or lander in the decades to come…
Maybe one way journeys to ‘the other Red Planet’ are the wave of the future.’ Pluto One anyone?