Intro
The Orbital Mechanics highlighted how little we know about planetary formation, so let’s talk about Pluto and what we’ve learned from the New Horizons Mission.
Pluto Basics

Officially a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt
About 0.18 the radius of Earth
Mass 0.178 of the moon’s
Very low density
Gravity 0.63 g
Neptune and Pluto were both predicted to exist from orbital perturbations of Uranus
Percival Lowell (founder of Lowell observatory) started the hunt for pluto in 1906.
Tombaugh found Pluto using a blink comparison technique
Moons of Pluto
Orbit is chaotic, we can predict forwards and backwards for several million years, but over the Lyapunov time we have no idea.

New Horizons

New Horizons Wiki Page
Launched January 20, 2006
Fly-by July 14, 2015
Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI)
Solar Wind At Pluto (SWAP)
Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation (PEPSSI)
Alice (UV imaging spectrometer)
Ralph telescope
Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter (VBSDC)
Radio Science Experiment (REX)

The Glitch

July 4, 2015 the software went into safe mode
Turned out to be a flaw in the timing of the commands in the fly-by prep software.
Full functionality restored July 7
9 hour round trip radio delay

Glaciers/Geology

Bright heart shape observed on the side of the planet during approach is ice (Tombaugh Regio)
Nitrogen ice flows like glaciers on Earth. Water ice is very brittle at surface conditions –390 F (–234 C)
Active surface is exciting, it’s not a dead planet!
Glacier Like Flows News Article from Science

Atmosphere

As UV light from the sun strikes the thin atmosphere, eventually making tholins that color the surface of the planet
Some particles remain suspended, shouldn’t be over 30 km (20 mi) off the sfc.
Particles were found to be up to 130 km (81 mi) above the surface
Atmospheric pressure is dropping

Charon

Space.com Article
Just as geologically exciting as Pluto
Likely atmospheric in origin, but could still be geologic
Low gravity of Pluto means it won’t hold onto its atmosphere…and Charon is near its same size, so it can pick up gravitationally what Pluto is putting down.
Red coating could take less than a million years to form

Near loss of the image

Science Magazine Article
Team opened the image file, but it was of Charon. They momentarily freaked wondering if the spacecraft wasn’t in the right position.
Ended up that they were looking in the wrong directory on a FTP server.

Future

2 months of particle and plasma instrument gathering
Will choose between two Kuiper belt objects and head that way to meet in 2019
Data transmission home for about 16 months

Getting the data back

Tops out about 1 kilobit per second on the 70 m dishes of the deep space network
Can double the rate using different polarization transmissions from the two amps “twittas”, but something else must be shut down to have enough power to run both at the same time

Links

Super Planet Crash APOD
Pluto time tool shows you when your lighting matches that on Pluto. Tweet your photos to us and NASA!
Article Announcing Haze and Ice Flows

Fun Paper Friday
This week’s fun paper sounds a little bit like Jurassic Park to us. What do you think? Blood vessels recovered from fossils.
Schweitzer, Mary H., et al. “Soft-tissue vessels and cellular preservation in Tyrannosaurus rex.” Science 307.5717 (2005): 1952–1955.
Contact us:
Show - www.dontpanicgeocast.com - @dontpanicgeo - [email protected]
John Leeman - www.johnrleeman.com - @geo_leeman
Shannon Dulin - @ShannonDulin

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