More stuff about Pluto

This synthetic perspective view of Pluto, based on the latest high-resolution images to be downlinked from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, shows what you would see if you were approximately 1,100 miles  above Pluto’s equatorial area, looking northeast over the dark, cratered, informally named Cthulhu Regio toward the bright, smooth, expanse of icy plains informally called Sputnik Planum. The entire expanse of terrain seen in this image is 1,100 miles  across. The images were taken as New Horizons flew past Pluto on July 14, 2015, from a distance of 50,000 miles.
 New close-up images of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft reveal a bewildering variety of surface features that have scientists reeling because of their range and complexity.
 Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we’ve seen in the solar system,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado. “If an artist had painted this Pluto before our flyby, I probably would have called it over the top — but that’s what is actually there.”
 New Horizons began its yearlong download of new images and other data over the Labor Day weekend. Images downlinked in the past few days have more than doubled the amount of Pluto’s surface seen at resolutions as good as (440 yards) per pixel. They reveal new features as diverse as possible dunes, nitrogen ice flows that apparently oozed out of mountainous regions onto plains, and even networks of valleys that may have been carved by material flowing over Pluto’s surface. They also show large regions that display chaotically jumbled mountains reminiscent of disrupted terrains on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. 
The surface of Pluto is every bit as complex as that of Mars,”  “The randomly jumbled mountains might be huge blocks of hard water ice floating within a vast, denser, softer deposit of frozen nitrogen within the region informally named Sputnik Planum.” 
New images also show the most heavily cratered -- and thus oldest -- terrain yet seen by New Horizons on Pluto next to the youngest, most crater-free icy plains. There might even be a field of dark wind-blown dunes, among other possibilities.
“Seeing dunes on Pluto -- if that is what they are -- would be completely wild, because Pluto’s atmosphere today is so thin,” So “Either Pluto had a thicker atmosphere in the past, or some process we haven’t figured out is at work. It’s a head-scratcher.”
 Discoveries being made from the new imagery are not limited to Pluto’s surface. Better images of Pluto’s moons Charon, Nix, and Hydra will be released Friday at the raw images site for New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), revealing that each moon is unique and that big moon Charon’s geological past was a tortured one. 
Images returned in the past days have also revealed that Pluto’s global atmospheric haze has many more layers than scientists realized, and that the haze actually creates a twilight effect that softly illuminates nightside terrain near sunset, making them visible to the cameras aboard New Horizons.

 Mosaic of high-resolution images of Pluto, sent back from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft from Sept. 5 to 7, 2015. The image is dominated by the informally-named icy plain Sputnik Planum, the smooth, bright region across the center. This image also features a tremendous variety of other landscapes surrounding Sputnik. The smallest visible features are 0.5 miles in size, and the mosaic covers a region roughly 1,000 miles wide. The image was taken as New Horizons flew past Pluto on July 14, 2015, from a distance of 50,000 miles .

 This 220-mile (350-kilometer) wide view of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft illustrates the incredible diversity of surface reflectivities and geological landforms on the dwarf planet. The image includes dark, ancient heavily cratered terrain; bright, smooth geologically young terrain; assembled masses of mountains; and an enigmatic field of dark, aligned ridges that resemble dunes; its origin is under debate. The smallest visible features are 0.5 miles (0.8 kilometers) in size. This image was taken as New Horizons flew past Pluto on July 14, 2015, from a distance of 50,000 miles (80,000 kilometers).

 This image of Pluto’s largest moon Charon, taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft 10 hours before its closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015 from a distance of 290,000 miles  is a recently downlinked, much higher quality version of a Charon image released on July 15. Charon, which is 750 miles  in diameter, displays a surprisingly complex geological history, including tectonic fracturing; relatively smooth, fractured plains in the lower right; several enigmatic mountains surrounded by sunken terrain features on the right side; and heavily cratered regions in the center and upper left portion of the disk. There are also complex reflectivity patterns on Charon’s surface, including bright and dark crater rays, and the conspicuous dark north polar region at the top of the image. The smallest visible features are 2.9 miles in size.

 Two different versions of an image of Pluto’s haze layers, taken by New Horizons as it looked back at Pluto's dark side nearly 16 hours after close approach, from a distance of 480,000 miles (770,000 kilometers), at a phase angle of 166 degrees. Pluto's north is at the top, and the sun illuminates Pluto from the upper right. These images are much higher quality than the digitally compressed images of Pluto’s haze downlinked and released shortly after the July 14 encounter, and allow many new details to be seen. The left version has had only minor processing, while the right version has been specially processed to reveal a large number of discrete haze layers in the atmosphere. In the left version, faint surface details on the narrow sunlit crescent are seen through the haze in the upper right of Pluto’s disk, and subtle parallel streaks in the haze may be crepuscular rays- shadows cast on the haze by topography such as mountain ranges on Pluto, similar to the rays sometimes seen in the sky after the sun sets behind mountains on Earth.

Tiny Cubesat Will Hunt for Water Ice on the Moon

A spacecraft the size of a cereal box will soon be hunting for water on the moon.
NASA has given the go-ahead to a mission called Lunar IceCube, a public-private partnership that will send a tiny cubesat to do water-ice prospecting from an elliptical orbit around the moon. The spacecraft's observations could aid future robotic and human exploration of Earth's nearest neighbor!Lunar IceCube is a key pathfinder experiment for future small-scale planetary missions!
 Lunar IceCube is a 6U ("6 unit") cubesat being developed by Morehead State University in Kentucky, with help from NASA Goddard and the Massachusetts-based Busek Company. One "unit" is a cube measuring 4 inches (10 centimeters) on a side; Lunar IceCube strings six of these cubesat building blocks together.
 Lunar IceCube will probably end up launching with a number of other deep-space cubesats on the first flight of NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket, which is currently scheduled for 2018.


Three cubesats — Lunar Flashlight, BioSentinel and NEA (near-Earth asteroid) Scout — are firmly on the manifest for that flight, and Lunar IceCube is widely expected to share the rocket ride when all is said and done. (There is room for 11 6U cubesats on the maiden SLS mission, whose primary purpose is sending NASA's Orion capsule on an uncrewed test flight around the moon.)
If Lunar IceCube does indeed blast off on the 2018 SLS flight, the tiny spacecraft will deploy from the megarocket and embark on a three-month trek to the moon that features several loops around Earth.
This circuitous route — which takes advantage of "gravity assists" from the moon and Earth — was chosen because the cubesat employs low-thrust miniature electric thrusters.
 Once it arrives at the moon, Lunar IceCube will use its lone instrument — called the Broadband InfraRed Compact High Resolution Explorer Spectrometer (BIRCHES) — to hunt for and characterize deposits of water ice during a six-month mission.
Lunar Flashlight will do similar work, but that cubesat will peer into permanently shadowed craters using its solar sail as a sunlight-reflecting mirror. Lunar IceCube, on the other hand, will search broader areas and attempt to measure water ice distribution as a function of latitude, time of day and regolith characteristics.
 Lunar IceCube, Lunar Flashlight, BioSentinel and NEA Scout are part of a growing movement to outfit cost-effective cubesats for deep-space exploration.
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For example, NASA also plans to launch two 6U cubesats along with its Mars InSight lander mission next year, to help relay communications back to Earth during the larger spacecraft's entry, descent and landing operations.
Researchers at the space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California have also built two identical 3U cubesats for the Interplanetary NanoSpacecraft Pathfinder In Relevant Environment (INSPIRE) mission, which will study the structure of the solar wind about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth. The INSPIRE duo is ready to go but still awaits assignment to a rocket.

 It should be noted that these small wouldn't replace the space probe we send into space.But they are great for to send it up to test out and instrument or like for the Mars mission.Remember these are very small,so only 1 instrument would be in the small space probe.Also these wouldn't be possible without spend the money on research into build instrument for example that on the New Horizon space probe to Pluto where all the instrument weight about 30 pounds and work with only about 30 watt of power just 10 years ago just one instrument on Cassini weight that much.NASA has always wanted to save weight.

New info about Pluto we didn't know until New Horizon flyby

New info about Pluto we didn't know until New Horizon flyby
1)Pluto is larger than we thought Pluto’s diameter is larger than expected about two-thirds the size of Earth’s moon, giving Pluto a surface area comparable to Russia. The finding is significant because it means the world is less dense than previously thought, indicating that it was composed of more ice and less rock.
2)Parts of Pluto are devoid of craters The distinctive heart-shaped region, named Tombaugh Regio, contains smooth plains without craters. Ancient surfaces in the solar system, such as those on the Moon, are peppered with craters which date from when the planets were formed 4.6 billion years ago. Pluto’s surface was thought to be ancient too but Tombaugh Regio can only be about 100 million years in age, which is young in geological terms.
3)Pluto’s internal heat source is a mystery To smooth away the craters, Pluto needs internal heat to soften or melt the surface. Where this heat comes from is a mystery. Pluto is thought to be too small to generate much radioactive heat, nor is it squeezed by a larger world to generate tidal energy, such as happens between Jupiter and its moons Io and Europa. Yet something is making it geologically active. This is the biggest mystery of the flyby. Resolving it promises to tell us something totally unexpected about planetary geology.Humm I thought I wrote something about this before the flyby,yes I did!!!Just was thinking outside of the box.Just my crazy mind coming up with something.
4)Pluto’s atmosphere is disappearing Radio waves beamed from Earth passed through Pluto’s tenuous atmosphere and were detected by New Horizons. They show that the pressure is just 1/100-thousandths that of Earth’s atmosphere at sea level. This is much lower than expected and could show that the atmosphere is rapidly freezing to the surface as Pluto moves away from the Sun.Plus they think Pluto has lost over 14 feet of its surface during its lifetime.Remember Pluto low gravity and during summertime Pluto's atmosphere is ticker than it was during the flyby.In some ways Pluto behaves like a comet,the comet can lose more than 1/3 of there surface ice during its close approach to the Sun.I bet during summertime on Pluto if you had a space probe nearby you could see the gas coming from Pluto atmosphere
5)Scientists still name things after Lord of the Rings Remember the good ol’days when all main-frame computers were named Gandalf and users were given Tolkeinesque names by the system administrator (who almost certainly looked like Gandalf)? NASA does. As soon as they saw the dark region near the pole of Pluto’s moon Charon, they started calling it Mordor..
6)Pluto has mountains 3.5km high To the south of Tombaugh Regio are mountains that have been termed Norgay Montes, after Tenzing Norgay, who climbed Mount Everest with Edmund Hillary in 1953. Pluto’s mountains are likely not made of rock but of rock-solid water ice. It is presently unknown what geological forces pushed up these jagged peaks, which are comparable to the Rocky Mountains on Earth. A second, lower mountain range on Pluto has been identified and named after Hilary.
7)Pluto’s surface looks like boiling milk The smooth plains of Tombaugh Regio have been called Sputnik Planum, after the first Russian satellite, launched in 1957. Much of these plains are separated into blocks, each about 12 miles wide. They resemble the pattern of convection cells seen in steadily boiling milk. Perhaps they are where heat escaped from the interior of Pluto and temporarily melted the surface before freezing over again, immortalizing the pattern.
8)Pluto’s red color comes from ‘molecular rain’ Images of Pluto’s tenuous atmosphere show haze layers where methane molecules have been broken apart by the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation. Recombining in various ways to form larger, more complicated molecules, these eventually become solid particles called tholins. They fall from the atmosphere onto Pluto’s surface. Being tar-like, the tholins give the surface a reddish-brown color.
9)A little more of my Pluto is like a comet!Pluto has a tail a bit like a comet Pluto is losing an estimated 500 tonnes of nitrogen every hour into space. In comparison, Mars is losing just 1 tonne of gas an hour into space. New Horizons flew through the dwarf planet’s nitrogen tail, which extends for 109,000 kilometers away from Pluto. The tail is sculpted by electrically charged particles from the Sun flowing past Pluto.
10)There will be more surprises to come from Pluto Data is trickling back at a rate that makes even rural broadband look fast. At more than five billion kilometres away, the New Horizons data rate just a few kilobits a second. On Earth, fiberoptic broadband can supply up to 150,000 kilobits per second. The result is that all the data from the flyby will take up to 16 months to download. So prepare for a steady stream of Pluto images and revelations in the months to come.Just think of this the radio power is only 10 watts and they pick up this weak radio wave from 2 billion miles away.That is like try to see a candle from New York and you in LA!Just think of its a xmas gift that keeps on giving!

More Pluto stuff

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,There is a lot of work that we need to do to understand this very complicated place.

 Photo show how Pluto looks like if we was there looking at it.
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, 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.
"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

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.

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,
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 amazing and I(Albert0) expect this,since the moon of Neptune Triton show some active on it surface. The appearance of this terrain, the utter lack of impact craters on Sputnik Planum, tells us that this is really a active world.

 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.

Some Pluto photos

NASA's New Horizons space probe obtained this image of the frozen plains of Pluto, released during a press briefing held on July 17, 2015

 New Horizons’ Ralph instrument revealed evidence of carbon monoxide ice on Pluto, in the western part of the region known presently as Tombaugh Regio (Tombaugh Region), the highly visible "heart of Pluto." The contours overlain on the image show that the concentration of frozen carbon monoxide increases towards the center of the “bull’s eye.” Data was acquired by the spacecraft on July 14, 2015, and transmitted to Earth on July 16.

 This diagram depicts the interaction of the solar wind (the supersonic outflow of electrically charged particles from the sun) with Pluto’s mainly nitrogen atmosphere. Some of the atmosphere's molecules possess enough energy to overcome Pluto’s weak gravity and escape into space. Image released July 17, 2015

 NASA's New Horizons space probe found a strange feature on Pluto's moon, Charon, a depression with a peak in the middle. The image was taken on July 14, 2015 at a range of 49,000 mile.

 New Horizons space probe provides the highest resolution image of Pluto ever seen as presented in a NASA press conference on July 15, 2015, at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland. This region near Pluto’s equator surprisingly contains a range of youthful mountains rising to heights of 11,000 feet (3,500 m) above the surface.

 New Horizons provides unprecedented details of Pluto's moon, Charon! July 2015

New Horizons' Ralph instrument using the LEISA spectrometer obtained info about the distribution of methane on Pluto, as presented in a NASA press conference on July 15, 2015,

New Pluto facts

Pluto has mountains made of ice that are as high as those in the Rockies, images from the New Horizons probe reveal.

They also show signs of geological activity on Pluto and its moon Charon.
On Wednesday, scientists presented the first pictures acquired by the New Horizons probe during its historic flyby of the dwarf planet.
The team has also named the prominent heart-shaped region on Pluto after the world's discoverer Clyde Tombaugh.
The spacecraft sped past the dwarf planet on Tuesday, getting as close as 12,500km and grabbing a huge volume of data.
 Mission scientist John Spencer told journalists that the first close-up image of Pluto's surface showed a terrain that had been resurfaced by some geological process - such as volcanism - within the last 100 million years.
 Not found is a single impact crater on this image. This means it must be a very young surface!!!
 This active geology needs some source of heat. Previously, such activity has only been seen on icy moons, where it can be explained by "tidal heating" caused by gravitational interactions with a large host planet.
 You do not need tidal heating to power geological activity on icy worlds. That's a really important discovery we just made this morning!! I still think most of the power come from under Pluto surface.
We now have an isolated, small planet that's showing activity after 4.5 billion years!
 This same image shows mountains at the edge of the heart-like region that are up to 11,000ft (3,300m) high and which team members compared to North America's Rocky Mountains.
T he relatively thin coating of methane, carbon monoxide and nitrogen ice on Pluto's surface was not strong enough to form mountains, so they were probably composed of Pluto's water-ice bedrock.
 Water-ice at Pluto temperatures is strong enough to hold up big mountains,remember at the temp at Pluto the water Ice is very hard!!!!!!
The thin frosting of nitrogen and other volatiles on top of water-ice bedrock was intriguing, because Pluto's tenuous, mainly nitrogen atmosphere was constantly being lost to space.

 Canyons on Charon A new image of Charon, Pluto’s largest moon. The moon has a dark patch, informally called Mordor, at its north pole. The image was taken from a distance of 289,000 miles.

A new photo of Pluto.

Remember the main flyby is in few day this July 14!!!!!
The dark spots appear on the hemisphere that always faces the moon Charon—the same side that will be invisible when New Horizons makes its closest approach on July 14th. Each one is now estimated to be roughly 300 miles across, and we haven’t a darn clue what they are. But, when this image is combined with composition and color data New Horizons hasn’t yet sent back, the Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team is hopeful it’ll be able to solve the mystery.