Tag: Charon

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A fictional Grand Tour portrays Pluto as it really is

New Horizons view of Sputnik Planitia
NASA's New Horizons probe sent back a view of a Texas-sized ice sheet known as Sputnik Planitia. (Credit: NASA GSFC / SwRI / JHUAPL)

NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto has forced astronomers to rewrite their textbooks — but that’s not all: New Horizons also forced Les Johnson to rewrite a novel.

The space scientist was tasked with taking notes that the famed science-fiction writer and editor Ben Bova left behind when he died in 2020, and turning them into a novel set on Pluto to close out Bova’s Grand Tour series of solar system tales.

In the material that Bova had written for “Pluto,” he described a rocky world with just a little bit of ice on it. But when Johnson sent those notes to planetary scientist Alan Stern, the New Horizons mission’s principal investigator, had to set him straight.

“His first comment back to me was, ‘We never found anything on Pluto that was anything like that,'” Johnson says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “And so I realized at that point that I was going to have to go back and revise the science behind the story of the environment on Pluto.”

The result is one of the first works of fiction that provides detailed descriptions of Pluto’s true surroundings, right down to the orange-tinged ice sheet of Sputnik Planitia and the dark and dirty spot on Charon, Pluto’s largest moon.

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How Pluto ‘spray-painted’ its biggest moon

Image: Charon
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft captured this high-resolution, enhanced color view of Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, just before closest approach on July 14, 2015. Scientists have learned that reddish material in the north (top) polar region – informally named Mordor Macula – is chemically processed methane that escaped from Pluto’s atmosphere onto Charon. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)

When NASA’s New Horizons probe sent back pictures of Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, researchers were surprised to see a big red spot on its north pole. More than a year later, they’ve published their best explanation for its origin.

Mission scientists guessed at the basic outlines of the answer a year ago, but in a paper published today by the journal Nature, they lay out the computer modeling to back up their guess.

The process begins when molecules of methane escape from Pluto’s thin atmosphere. Those molecules are drawn to Charon, a mere 12,200 miles away, by the moon’s gravitational pull. The rarefied methane gas freezes out and settles onto the surface as ice.

Methane ice piles up when it’s winter in the north, but when the season turns toward spring, the northern polar region is exposed to sunlight. The sun’s ultraviolet rays cook the methane into a mix of hydrocarbons.

As the ice warms up, any methane that remains thaws back into gas. But the heavier hydrocarbons stick around on the surface, and get cooked into reddish organic compounds known as tholins.

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Did Pluto’s moon Charon once have an ocean?

Image: Charon
This close-up of Charon’s canyons was taken by NASA’s New Horizons probe during last July’s flyby. The color-coded picture shows elevation data. Serenity Chasma’s depth can exceed 4 miles in places. In comparison, the Grand Canyon’s maximum depth is a mile. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)

Scientists say the patterns of ice in canyons on Charon, Pluto’s largest moon, look as if some the frozen water was once liquid. And that suggests Charon had a subsurface ocean in ancient times.

The evidence comes from close analysis of images and elevation data collected last July when NASA’s New Horizons probe zoomed past Pluto and its moons. Even before the flyby, scientists speculated that Charon may have harbored liquid water, and that some water may still flow beneath its icy surface. The stereo measurements from New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LORRI, are consistent with that hypothesis.

The clues come in the form of stretch marks in the ice around Serenity Chasma, a canyon that’s 4.5 miles deep in some places.

“Charon’s tectonic landscape shows that, somehow, the moon expanded in its past, and – like Bruce Banner tearing his shirt as he becomes the Incredible Hulk – Charon’s surface fractured as it stretched,” the science team said in an image advisory on Thursday.

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Get an all-around view of Pluto and Charon

Pluto views
An array of images shows Pluto from all sides, as seen by NASA’s New Horizons probe over the course of one full Plutonian day (6.4 Earth days) from July 7 to 13. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)

The bright heart of Pluto has been burned into our consciousness, thanks to scads of high-resolution pictures. But a new set of images from NASA’s New Horizons mission provides an all-around view of the dwarf planet, including the splotchy shapes that went out of view days before the time of closest approach on July 14.

Another 10-picture set shows Pluto’s biggest moon, Charon, from all sides.

The imagery was captured over the course of a full Plutonian day, which is 6.4 Earth days long. New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager and the Ralph / Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera were trained on the icy worlds as the distance to Pluto decreased from 5 million miles on July 7 to 400,000 miles on July 13.

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Science gives Pluto its day in the sun

Image: Pluto's edge
NASA’s New Horizons probe captured this backlit image of Pluto as it flew past the dwarf planet on July 14. Scattered sunlight reveals numerous haze layers within Pluto’s thin atmosphere, while the surprisingly diverse surface landscape indicates ongoing geological activity. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)

The first peer-reviewed scientific paper about the New Horizons probe’s July flyby past Pluto lays out puzzling evidence that suggests the dwarf planet isn’t frozen in time. Rather, its smooth plains, high mountains and nitrogen glaciers are leading the NASA mission’s researchers to suspect that it’s geologically active even now.

“Pluto’s still got an engine, and it’s still running,” principal investigator Alan Stern of Southwest Research Institute told journalists in advance of the paper’s publication today by the journal Science.

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