New Pluto Images Reveal Glaciers Flowing from the Heart

New images released from the New Horizons spacecraft's encounter with Pluto reveal a reddish world, where water is as hard as rock, and substances that are gas on Earth have become ice glaciers. The beautiful color picture with this post shows you a section of Pluto that includes the heart-shaped feature named after Clyde Tombaugh, Pluto's discoverer. The left lobe (section) of the heart is being called the "Sputnik region," after the first satellite humanity ever sent into outer space.

Why is Pluto reddish? The team's first thought is that ultra-violet light from the Sun acts on the gases in the thin Pluto atmosphere -- methane (natural gas) in particular -- and breaks them apart and reforms them into more complicated combinations of hydrogen and carbon. Eventually, the molecules get so complex and heavy, they fall out of the air and coat the surface. Such hydrocarbons tend to be reddish when we see them on other worlds.

The New Horizons craft has only returned about 5% of the data it has stored in its memory, but even first results show haze layers in the Pluto atmosphere that support the notion of the air having chemical reactions going on, despite the cold.

If you look at the Heart in the picture, you can see that the left Sputnik region (which is about the size of Texas) has a thicker covering of ice than the right half of the Heart. Our black-and-white image shows a close-up about 250 miles wide in the northern part of Sputnik. At the top you see some of the older, cratered terrain that is above the Heart. But below that, the Heart itself is smooth and young-looking (no craters, which are a sign of age.)

The smooth ice we see is made of nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide, its top layers freezing out of the air when Pluto gets further from the Sun. (Pluto was closest to the Sun in its almost 250-year orbit in 1989, so we are just moving away from the time that Pluto is warmest.)

At Pluto temperatures, an ice made of nitrogen will very slowly flow, like a glacier flows across the landscape on Earth. The arrows on our black-and-white image show the direction scientists think the ice is flowing in Sputnik. At Friday's press conference, the experts said that their impression of Sputnik is that it's a very young region (geologically speaking) -- perhaps only tens of millions of years old. (For comparison, we think Pluto, like the rest of the solar system, is 4600 million years old.) Its glaciers have moved into any available regions next to Sputnik, and have filled valleys and craters on all sides.

Look also at the intriguing "polygon" patterns (many-sided figures) in the ice of Sputnik on our picture. They look like huge, geometric cells in the ice, perhaps half a mile or more deep. One possibility is that in these cells, hotter material from deeper inside is slowly rising, a process called "convection."

These images and ideas are just the (pardon the expression when discussing Pluto), just the tip of the iceberg. It will take 16 months for the full set of pictures and data to be sent back from New Horizons. Better images are expected in September, for example. Stay tuned.

In this last image, you see Pluto (left) and its large moon Charon in realistic color.  Such a dramatic pair at the outskirts of our solar system!

Getting Close-up with Pluto's Moon Charon

One of the most intriguing things about Pluto is that it is more of a double planet than a planet with moons. One of Pluto's moons, Charon (pronounced like Sharon or Karen; both are used) is half the size of Pluto. No other moon we know is this big compared to the planet it orbits -- just another way that the Pluto system operates outside the usual rulebooks.

The diameter of Charon has been measured to be 751 miles, about the size of Texas. Charon has settled into the most comfortable orbit around Pluto that nature permits. It rotates and revolves in 6.4 Earth days, which is also the rate at which Pluto turns. This means that the day on Pluto is the same length as the Charon month, which hurts your head if you try to think too much about it.

Now the New Horizons craft is starting to send back images of Charon as well, and again, we are surprised. Our photo shows a black and white global picture of Charon that has been tinted with actual color information from one of the other instruments. The New Horizons team is informally referring to the striking dark spot near the top of the image as "Mordor," much to the delight of fans of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

But the inset in our picture is the most interesting. It shows an area of about 240 miles across (from top to bottom) and you can see some of the trenches and canyons that we are finding on Charon. Craters are also visible. Near the top left, we see a giant ice mountain sticking out of a trench. The NASA news release says: “This is a feature that has geologists stunned and stumped.” How did the mountain get or grow in there? It's those kind of odd mysteries that scientists live for.

(By the way, if you were asking yourself why the big moon has two different ways of pronouncing its name, it's a romantic story. The proper pronunciation from Greek mythology is like "Karen". But James Christy, the astronomer who discovered the big moon in 1978, secretly wanted the name to also remind people of his wife Charlene. So he likes making the name sound more like "Sharon." Astronomers (like most people) love romantic stories, so many use the pronunciation that Christy likes.

And Pluto itself has a name with a secret -- the astronomers at the Lowell observatory wanted to name it after their patron and founder, Percival Lowell, but we don't name planets after real people. So when a schoolgirl in England suggested the name Pluto to them, they jumped at it, since the first two letters are Lowell's initials.)

First Close-up Peek at Pluto's Surface

Here is the first detailed image of the surface of Pluto, released today, and it's already providing surprises. The yellow bar gives you a sense of scale; Pluto's diameter is 1473 miles (just measured by New Horizons), so we are seeing only a small part of it here.

The angular structures in the top half of the picture are mountains, the tallest being about 2 miles high. Most likely these mountains are made of frozen water -- it's so cold on Pluto that water becomes harder than rock. In fact, it is likely to be layers of "hard frozen water" that make up much of the surface of this distant world.

The biggest surprise is that the surface shows no craters, large or small. Craters are made on every world when chunks of rock or ice hit and carve out a circular depression. Since every world is regularly being hit by pieces of cosmic debris that fly through our solar system, any world without craters must have a way of erasing them pretty quickly after they form. Scientists are estimating that the absence of craters means that the surface of Pluto is being refreshed by some process, and can't be more than a hundred millions years old -- which is very YOUNG compared to the 4600 million year age of the solar system. What keeps the surface of this little world refreshed and erased is the first challenge Pluto has thrown in the face of the scientists eager to study it.

The Revenge of the Dwarf Planets

Pluto Seen July 11, 2015 from NASA's New Horizons Spacecraft

This coming Tuesday, July 14th, humanity will -- for the first time -- fly by the world formerly known as planet Pluto.  Actually, the New Horizons spacecraft will be flying by a double world, because Pluto has a giant moon, Charon, which is half its size.  I can't wait to see the pictures.

In fact, see the Pluto image with this post -- it's from yesterday and already shows intriguing spots and circular areas.  Check out the even better new pictures and information as they are revealed this coming week and month.  You can find them at: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/ 

When the data from the flyby are returned to Earth -- and they will take a year to download (and you think your connection is slow!!) -- we will have completed our first-look exploration of all the main worlds known when most of my readers were born.

Pluto was "kicked out of the planet club" only because a whole bunch of other "Plutos" were found beyond Neptune.  Pluto turned out to be the first of its kind (found by Clyde Tombaugh at Lowell Observatory in 1930), but now we've found Eris (which is the same size as Pluto) and several other round icy worlds that are smaller versions of them.  We probably should have picked a less insulting name than dwarf planet, but we used the word dwarf successfully in combination with star and galaxy, so we didn't anticipate so much public hostility to it.  For the full story, see: http://www.pbs.org/seeinginthedark/astronomy-topics/planets-and-pluto.html 

A few of Clyde Tombaugh's ashes are aboard the New Horizons craft.  You can read his own story of the discovery at: http://astrosociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ab2009-23.pdf

Here is Clyde Tombaugh with your friendly blogger in 1985

Pluto is known to have four smaller moons, and others may yet be discovered in the coming weeks.  Pluto also has a thin changeable atmosphere, which instruments will be investigating as we fly by.

Another world that got reclassified in the Pluto saga was Ceres, the largest asteroid, which is now also called a dwarf planet.  Ceres is the only member of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to be round.  The Dawn spacecraft is settling into a lower and lower orbit around Ceres this summer and fall, and will be sending back never-before-seen details of what this intriguing world (about the size of Texas) looks like.

So it's going to be a summer of dwarf planet discovery.  They are going to be in the news so much, maybe we'll forget the issue of the name and enjoy them for what they have to tell us about the history and diversity of the solar system.

If you are really into the Pluto encounter, the most comprehensive post about what's happening is Emily Lakdawalla's at: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/06240556-what-to-expect-new-horizons-pluto.html