Pluto's Unique Weirdness Grows
New Horizons’ Last Portrait of Pluto’s Puzzling Spots, NASA
“Three billion miles from Earth and just two and a half million miles from Pluto, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has taken its best image of four dark spots that continue to captivate. The spots appear on the side of Pluto that always faces its largest moon, Charonthe face that will be invisible to New Horizons when the spacecraft makes its close flyby the morning of July 14. New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado, describes this image as “the last, best look that anyone will have of Pluto’s far side for decades to come.”
Is @NASANewHorizons recycling images from 1902's "A Trip to the Moon"? #plutoflyby #NASA pic.twitter.com/5JatvUh4yo
— plutotoday (@plutotoday) July 11, 2015
Need to start thinking about an orbiter for Pluto. Those spots will drive planetary scientists nuts. Maybe a Dawn-type mission that could slow down and go into orbit, although it would necessarily take longer to reach Pluto — a LOT longer, maybe 20 years or longer.
While that’s the best resolution for those particular spots, similar features on the other side of the planet (the head of the “whale” in particular) will be imaged at much higher resolution, which ought to clarify a lot. After all of the data is worked through, there will be many questions remaining, but a Pluto orbiter will probably remain low priority for a looong time. As far as continued Kuiper belt science is concerned, flybys of other worlds like Haumea will represent the most rational low-hanging fruit in coming decades.
https://www.google.com/url?…
I hope we get higher resolution images during the flyby. The fuzzy gray images they’ve shown so far have been a pretty big disappointment. Even though it’s not very scientific, the spacecraft designers need to understand that if they want to catch the attention of the public (and get funding from them), they need to provide beautiful, full-color high resolution photos of the places they visit.
Reason I felt they should have planned an orbitial mission years earlier and launched years earlier.
But hey, nasa has always launched a fly bys first.
Why do anything different, new and bold now?
Hope I’m eating my words tomorrow night. 🙂
You should review what it took to get New Horizons to launch before talking about some other mission they should have done years before.
As I remember it was one hell of a battle over a number of years to get New Horizons funded and they were damn lucky to get the mission approved when they did.
One of the things that I most respect about NASA is their careful, systematic expansion of capabilities. Flybys come first for a reason, and the Kuiper belt is still very much on the frontier of our capabilities.
Said images will be coming. It’s tough to get high resolution of surface details from millions of miles away with a camera onboard a probe half the weight of a Mini Cooper, a probe that has to accommodate other instruments and has a seriously limited communication bandwidth.
That aside, it’s not always possible to meet the unrealistic expectations of the public, and in this case it wasn’t possible.
I would guess that the images that will eventually be obtained will have a resolution similar to or a little better than those Voyager obtained of Neptune’s moon Triton. A one shot flyby will always be a compromise of image quality and the simple logistics of everything else required in those few precious minutes of closest approach. It also seems they are trying to get these images out asap and hence they are probably not yet optimized, once these B+W images are fully processed and matched with lower resolution colour images the results will probably be far more stunning. Kudos to the team for attempting to get the images published a quickly as they can, not every mission does.
On thursday it will return images 30X higher resolution than the best pictures released today. Eventually it will return the close-up color pictures collected also. Be patient, they actually have to do the flyby first.
Just send money.
Unfortunately, any follow-on mission to Pluto is going to take a backseat to missions to Mars, Titan, and other inner solar system destinations. Worse, I imagine planetary science will take budget hits, especially when SLS starts encountering cost overruns and delays.
Maybe. After the Neptune Orbiter, and the Uranus Orbiter, and the Europa exploration effort, and- that money-sucker, Mars, gets more orbiters and landers and who knows what else.
Twenty years is a pretty conservative estimate- we are at least that far away from an alternative propulsion system with sufficient delta-v. That I know about, anyway.
“The spots appear on the side of Pluto that always faces its largest moon”
Question: From this statement, does that meant that Charon and Pluto are more or less gravitationally locked? If so, might this result in a tidal action that would foster these sort of features? Or if not just gravity, the fact that these features are occuring on the side always facing Charon rather points a frosty finger at that moon as having SOME sort of hand in their creation/maintenance.
My 2-cents tossed waaaay out of the box: Based interestingly from looking at a recent space-art NASA touted called “Pluto by Moonlight” showing a half-Charon in the antarctic sky of Pluto (eerily beautiful; made it my wallpaper for the week). It included an interesting article based on what we currently know of this “double-world”:
https://solarsystemDOTnasaDOTgov/multimedia/displayDOTcfm?IM_ID=20217
The observation was that despite the distance from the sun, given its closeness to the [dwarf] planet and the fact that it is almost totally covered in ice, Charon would actually reflect enough of that distant sun to illuminate Pluto’s surface such that one could walk around without artificial illumination, and not bump into anything. So if THAT’s true, might not Charon’s reflective properties provide just enough energy to raise the surface temperature, and assist the moon’s gravitational work in causing those “spots”?
Yes, Pluto and Charon are tidally locked. This means there is no internal tidal friction going on within Pluto (or Charon).
So I don’t think there’s any way to infer that tidal action was the cause of these features. However, they might actually be the cause for that hemisphere to be pointed at Charon – take for example our own Moon, the dark Mare are ancient impact craters, where dense lava flowed up from within the Moon to the surface. This made that hemisphere of the moon slightly more dense than the opposing hemisphere, with the result that the more dense side of the Moon eventually came to be gravitationally locked towards Earth. That said, I don’t think we have enough information yet to say that this is the case for Pluto.
I don’t care if it takes a week (or a month for that matter) to send the photo back. There will never be another chance (in our lifetime) to get a close-up high resolution photo of Pluto. That should have been WAY up on the priority list for this mission.
It was and is. One of the first things the probe will send back post-flyby are the highest resolution images.
As was said earlier, the probe actually has to do the flyby first! Then the data gets sent back. You said you don’t care how long it takes for the data to get sent back, so you are in luck. Kick back and wait.
Using a bank of NEXT thrusters? About 5 years with a 50% fuel-mass ratio.
(The problem is power. Confine the acceleration to inside Jupiter’s orbit, where SEP is effective, and you are restricted to either a fast flyby or a 45+yr trip time.)