Thursday Reads: Pluto and Other News

Good Morning!!

So Pluto is in the news. I’m really out of the loop. I still have constant itching on my arms, face, neck and upper chest, and this morning there are some raised areas like hives on my arms and on my chest just below the neck. I’m still taking Benedryl every 6 hours and using Calamine lotion frequently, but the itching is always there in the background. It makes it so hard to concentrate on anything! So I’m behind in following current events. The Pluto stuff is fascinating, and I wish I could focus enough to really understand what’s happening.

Pluto and Charon

Remarkable new details of Pluto’s largest moon Charon are revealed in this image from New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), taken late on July 13, 2015, from a distance of 289,000 miles (466,000 kilometers).
NASA-JHUAPL-SwRI

UPI: NASA releases first historic Pluto flyby images.

Scientists, engineers, astronauts and mission officials all held their breath Tuesday evening as they awaited for NASA’s New Horizons probe to come back online. When it did, at 8:52:37 p.m. EST — just on schedule — everyone let out a big cheer and sigh of relief.

The probe executed its historic flyby of the dwarf planet Pluto, and it was forced to shut down its communication systems to focus on collecting data and imagery as it whizzed by the distant dwarf’s icy surface. New Horizons was silent for more than 22 hours.

Now, the probe is beaming back the rewards of those 22 lonely hours. On Wednesday afternoon, NASA began releasing the photographic exploits of New Horizons’ feat.

A live presentation detailing the first release of images was streamed on NASA TV. Wednesday’s revelations are only the beginning. More images and discoveries will be released Friday — and the days and weeks and months to come. The probe will need 16 months to return all the data collected.

I’ve included some of the photos in this post. See more at NASA’s website.

Bloomberg: Pluto and Charon Shock NASA Scientists With the Unexpected.

Cable news channels have been airing the latest images from Pluto all week. Twitter is filled with #PlutoFlyby musings. Popular brands have photoshopped themselves onto the far-away dwarf planet to get a piece of the action.

And yet, the giddiest and most awestruck observers may be the NASA scientists in charge of the mission.

“I don’t think any one of us could have imagined that it was this kind of a toy store,” said Alan Stern, the mission’s principal investigator. He spoke at a NASA press conference, held at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, where the mission team unveiled new images and the initial insights they provoked.

The New Horizons spacecraft has sent back initial high-resolution photos of the dwarf planet Pluto and its moon Charon. The detail they provide has already transformed scientific understanding of what’s happening on the orb 3 billion miles away.

New close-up images of a region near Pluto’s equator reveal a giant surprise: a range of youthful mountains.
NASA-JHUAPL-SwRI

What’s so surprising?

For one, Pluto has virtually no craters. Pluto and Charon should be pockmarked, like the Earth’s moon. They sit at the edge of the solar system, near the Kuiper Belt, which is filled with rocks, ices, and other materials left over from the formation of the solar system. By contrast, a smooth surface is one that’s been refreshed, somewhat recently, and perhaps continuously.

And that means that Pluto is a geologically active planet.

There are also 11,000-foot mountains of water-ice, another sign of internal activity. Scientists have seen volcanism on the moons of large gas planets, such as Saturn and Jupiter. That makes more sense. The gravity of a giant planet mashes the little moons from the inside out, which is why Jupiter’s Europa and Io show volcanic activity. Pluto has no giant neighbor. The planet generates heat on its own, and from these first images, the scientists can’t say why—possibly the presence of radioactive elements. It’s Pluto’s first lesson: You can have activity on a planet that has no giant neighbor. That sounds arcane, but to hear these scientists talk about it, you’d have thought someone had given each of them a pony.

Photo from Boing Boing

I hope those “experts” who took away Pluto’s planet status are very ashamed of themselves. Read more about Pluto and about Charon’s surprises at the link.

The Economist: Pluto’s icy mountains.

“WE ARE outbound from Pluto.” So said Alice Bowman, mission operations manager for New Horizons, an American space probe, when her charge resumed contact with Earth following its passage by the place on July 14th. After nine and a half years of its being inbound to Pluto, her announcement was met with jubilation. On July 15th the craft sent back the first hints of what it had seen as it whizzed by at 14km a second. Even these preliminary data are filled with mysteries that will take years to unravel.

Pluto is, on first blush, unlike any single world yet seen in the solar system. Instead, it is a composite of many of them—with mountain ranges more than 3km high. These are altitudes that suggest the crust of frozen nitrogen and methane on Pluto’s surface must be supported by ice, which is much stronger.

What is most surprising, as the image shows, is how unmarked by meteorite impacts Pluto is. Some geological process must be refreshing its surface. That requires amounts of heat that no geophysicist would have guessed Pluto had going spare. Far from being a dead, icy world, Pluto has proved itself a very lively one.

The New Yorker: Passing Pluto.

Soon after the New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to Pluto, at 7:49 A.M. on Tuesday—seventy-two seconds ahead of schedule, after a nine-and-a-half-year journey—Bonnie Buratti, one of the mission’s scientists, told me that she had been worried that the dwarf planet “would be a bit bland.” NASA had even booked the magician David Blaine to entertain the crowd that gathered at mission control, at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, in suburban Maryland, just in case the first high-resolution images proved insufficiently wondrous. As it happened, Buratti’s concern was unfounded. Even the New Horizons team, dedicated Plutophiles all, seemed astonished when the images came in. “This is a psychedelic Pluto,” Cathy Olkin, the mission’s deputy project scientist, told me. Kimberly Ennico-Smith, the science team’s co-investigator, tweeted a double exponent: “Wow^Wow^Wow.” Alan Stern, the principal investigator, called the photos “mouthwatering.”

More images have begun streaming in this morning. Even at the speed of light, signals from New Horizons take around four and a half hours to travel the three billion miles back to Earth, and the download rate makes a dial-up modem seem positively zippy. Indeed, although the closest approach took place on Tuesday morning, it wasn’t until that night, at 8:52 P.M., that the team found out that their spacecraft had survived the flyby. There were hugs, high-fives, speeches, standing ovations, and some tears. But the team’s work was far from over. So much information was gathered during the maneuver that it will take sixteen months to return it all to Earth, and longer still to analyze it. Soon, we will have images of Pluto’s surface so detailed that, if they were of Earth, you could pick out the ponds in Manhattan’s Central Park. With those images will come detailed topographical information, composition data, and atmospheric readings. We will find out whether Pluto has visible rings; whether it shares an atmosphere with Charon, its largest moon; whether it has clouds or haze; whether it hosts a deep subsurface ocean or active geology; and much, much more.

Not so long ago, Pluto was little more than a blurry cluster of pixels. When the New Horizons team set out to map the mission’s trajectory, they discovered that no one knew precisely where Pluto was; its orbit takes so long (two hundred and forty-eight Earth years) that humankind had been capable of observing only about a third of it, and the best guesses as to its distance from the sun had a six-thousand-mile margin of error. Glen Fountain, the New Horizons project manager, compared the challenge of hitting the team’s target window to a golfer, standing in New York City, sinking a hole-in-one on a golf course in suburban Los Angeles. “We have managed that so well that even I don’t believe it,” he said.

More fascinating reading at the link.

False color photos of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon (read more below).

CNN: Mind-blowing Pluto has ice mountains and water.

But Pluto is turning out to be full of surprises.

“I’m completely surprised,” said Alan Stern, principal investigator for NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft.

The first zoomed-in image of Pluto was released on Wednesday, a day after the spacecraft made its closest pass over Pluto, cruising about 7,700 miles over the surface. The probe traveled more than 3.6 billion miles to snap the photo, and scientists think it was well worth the trip.

The new image shows a crisp, clear view of Pluto’s surface, and it’s covered with wide smooth areas, lumpy terrain and mountains. Huge mountains.

“They would stand up respectably against the Rocky Mountains,” said John Spencer, a planetary scientist on the New Horizons mission.

The height of the mountains is important because it’s a clue that there may be water on Pluto. Scientists know that Pluto’s surface is covered with nitrogen ice, methane ice and carbon monoxide ice. But Spencer says, “You can’t make mountains out of that stuff. It’s too soft.”

That leaves H₂0 — water ice like we have here on Earth.

Wow!

Notes on the false color photo above from Business Insider:

The colors here are not true colors. They’re exaggerated to highlight the differences in Pluto’s and Charon’s surface composition. Also, this is a composite image — Pluto and Charon are much farther apart than they appear in the image.

The psychedelic mix of colors tells scientists that both Pluto and Charon have complex surfaces and its got them excited about the even more-detailed surface data yet to be downloaded from the New Horizons craft.

“These images show that Pluto and Charon are truly complex worlds,” Will Grundy, New Horizons co-investigator said in a NASA release. “There’s a whole lot going on here.”

The image was captured on July 13 using the color filters on New Horizon’s Ralph instrument. Color maps like these will help scientists figure out the molecular make up of the ice on Pluto and Charon and how old some of their surface features (like craters) are.

The image reveals that Pluto’s “heart” doesn’t have a uniform composition. The left lobe is a light peach color, while the right lobe is more bluish. They don’t know, for sure, what those colors mean, but additional data will likely shed some light on those mysteries.

Scientists think the deep red color around Charon’s north pole could means the surface there is full of hydrocarbons.

Finally, from the Guardian, a backgrounder on the Pluto project: Pluto New Horizons mission: what happens next?

Other News, Links Only

Jamelle Bouie at Slate: Two Americas. Hillary Clinton and Scott Walker have utterly different visions for our future.

The Guardian on nervous Texans: ‘Absolutely nothing’ but usual quiet in Texas hub on first day of Jade Helm 15.

KFOR.com: “We don’t believe it’s a symbol of racism,” Confederate flags fly downtown as President drives in.

Vox: The Planned Parenthood controversy over aborted fetus body parts, explained.

People: Child Molester Charged with Murder in 1975 Disappearance of Two Sisters.

Boston Globe: A history of Donald Trump thinking he knows better than Boston, Including when he thought buying the Patriots was a bad financial investment.

Boston Globe: Boston Mayor Marty Walsh will “absolutely not” apologize to Donald Trump.

What else is happening? Please post your thoughts and links in the comment thread and enjoy your Thursday!