Tag: Dwarf Planets

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Pluto’s champions tell the tale of an epic mission

Image: Pluto stamp
The 1991 stamp that served as the rallying cry for the New Horizons Mission to Pluto is “updated” by members of the New Horizons science team on July 14, 2015, the day the spacecraft flew past Pluto. Principal investigator Alan Stern is at far left. (Credit: Bill Ingalls / NASA)

It took nine years for NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft to get to Pluto, and laying the groundwork for that history-making space mission here on Earth took nearly twice as long.

The drama and intrigue surrounding New Horizons during those decades, as chronicled in a new book titled “Chasing New Horizons: Inside the First Mission to Pluto,” might be enough for any planetary scientist. But Alan Stern — the book’s co-author, the mission’s principal investigator and arguably Pluto’s most ardent defender — is ready to do it all again.

Stern doesn’t expect his campaign to send an orbiter to Pluto to face quite as many challenges, now that the world knows so much more about the dwarf planet with a giant heart.

“I hope it’s a more straightforward process,” Stern told GeekWire. “First of all, there are now a lot more people who are interested in going back to Pluto. … Now that we’ve done the flyby, there isn’t a planetary scientist in the world that isn’t impressed.”

Last month, Stern and other New Horizons scientists signed onto a white papercalling for NASA to fund an in-depth study of potential Pluto orbiter missions. That grass-roots approach mirrors how the “Pluto Underground” campaign for New Horizons got started around a restaurant table in Baltimore,  back in 1989.

“Chasing New Horizons,” written by Stern and astrobiologist David Grinspoon, traces the twists and turns that led from there to the piano-sized spacecraft’s launch in 2006 and its Pluto flyby in 2015.

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Water, water everywhere on dwarf planet Ceres

Hydrogen on Ceres
NASA’s Dawn spacecraft determined the hydrogen content of the upper yard, or meter, of Ceres’ surface. Blue indicates where hydrogen content is higher, near the poles, while red indicates lower content at lower latitudes. (NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA / PSI Photo)

Readings from instruments aboard NASA’s Dawn orbiter support the view that a treasure trove of frozen water lies just beneath the surface of the dwarf planet Ceres.

Researchers reported those findings today at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting San Francisco, as well as in two papers published by Nature Astronomy and Science.

The findings are based on hydrogen readings from Dawn’s gamma ray and neutron detector, or GRaND, as well as from the spacecraft’s cameras and infrared mapping spectrometer.

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Dawn probe points to ice volcano on Ceres

Image: Ceres' Ahuna Mons
Ceres’ lonely mountain, Ahuna Mons, is seen in this simulated perspective view. The elevation has been exaggerated by a factor of two. The view was made using enhanced-color images from NASA’s Dawn mission. (Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA / PSI)

Scientists say a mysterious mountain on the dwarf planet Ceres was apparently once an ice volcano, spewing salty water and mud instead of lava.

They also say Ceres has patches of water ice that can be seen on or near the surface, and might have an off-and-on atmosphere that contains water vapor.

The scientists say all this and more in six research papers published in this week’s issue of the journal Science. The studies are based on more than a year’s worth of orbital observations from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft. Dawn is still circling 590-mile-wide Ceres, which is the solar system’s smallest dwarf planet as well as its biggest main-belt asteroid.

The mysterious mountain is Ahuna Mons, a 3-mile-high peak that looks like a bright space pyramid. Scientists took note of the peak’s concave top, its elliptical base, cracks at the summit, steep slopes and other features that pointed to previous volcanic activity.

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Hunt for Planet Nine leads to mini-worlds

Image: Planet X
An artist’s conception shows Planet X, a.k.a. Planet Nine. (Credit: Robin Dienel / Carnegie Inst.)

The hypothetical world known as Planet X or Planet Nine hasn’t yet been found, but thanks to the search, astronomers have discovered smaller worlds on the solar system’s edge.

Mapping such objects could lead to the big discovery: a planet that’s thought to be at least several times bigger than Earth, lurking at least 200 times farther away from the sun. Or it could lead to a different explanation for the puzzling, highly elongated orbits of some of the objects that lie far beyond Pluto.

Planet Nine’s existence was proposed last year as the most elegant way to account for the orbits of worlds such as Sedna and 2012 VP113 (which has been nicknamed “Biden” in honor of the veep). Ever since then, astronomers have been surveying the skies in hopes of tracking it down.

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One year later, New Horizons revisits Pluto flyby

160714-pluto6
Composite image shows enhanced-color views of Charon and Pluto. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)

One year ago today, NASA’s New Horizons probe whizzed past Pluto and opened up a new frontier for planetary science – and to mark the occasion, the mission team is looking back at its greatest hits and looking ahead to a landing.

“It’s strange to think that only a year ago, we still had no real idea of what the Pluto system was like,” project scientist Hal Weaver, who’s based at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, said in a news release celebrating the anniversary. “But it didn’t take long for us to realize Pluto was something special, and like nothing we ever could have expected.”

After more than nine years of cruising through interplanetary space, the piano-sized New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto and its moons at a speed of more than 30,000 mph on July 14, 2015, capturing readings as it went. Since then, the probe has been transmitting gigabytes’ worth of data back to Earth at a slow but steady rate.

The pictures have been unprecedented, providing the first close look at icy worlds that whirl more than 3 billion miles from the sun, in a region known as the Kuiper Belt. They’ve even inspired a set of postage stamps.

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Astronomers spot an icy world beyond Pluto

The golden ellipse indicates the orbit of the newly confirmed object 2015 RR245. Click on the image for a larger version. (Credit: Alex Parker / OSSOS Team)
The golden ellipse indicates the orbit of the newly confirmed object 2015 RR245. Click on the image for a larger version. (Credit: Alex Parker / OSSOS Team)

Astronomers have found an icy world that ranges far beyond the orbit of Neptune and may well rank as a dwarf planet alongside Pluto.

The newly detected object, designated 2015 RR245, is thought to be less than a third the width of Pluto (435 miles vs. 1,474 miles), but its orbit is more eccentric. Its distance from the sun ranges from about 34 to more than 120 astronomical units, where each AU equals the distance between Earth and the sun. In comparison, Pluto’s orbit has a range of 30 to 50 AU.

Right now, 2015 RR245 is 80 AU from the sun and closing in, based on observations from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Hawaii’s big island. It should reach the nearest point in its 733-year orbit in the year 2096.

“The icy worlds beyond Neptune trace how the giant planets formed and then moved out from the sun. They let us piece together the history of our solar system. But almost all of these icy worlds are painfully small and faint: It’s really exciting to find one that’s large and bright enough that we can study it in detail,” Michele Bannister, an astronomer at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, said in a statement.

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This may be the best view of Pluto we ever see

Image: Pluto surface
Craters and linear features are scattered across Pluto’s terrain in this high-resolution view from NASA’s New Horizons probe. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)

Almost a year after NASA’s New Horizons probe flew past Pluto, the team behind the mission has put together a long mosaic strip that includes all of the highest-resolution images.

“This new image product is just magnetic,” Alan Stern, a planetary scientist from Southwest Research Institute who serves as New Horizons’ principal investigator, said today in a NASA news release. “It makes me want to go back on another mission to Pluto and get high-resolution images like these across the entire surface.”

The view starts up at the edge of Pluto’s disk and runs hundreds of miles, down to nearly the terminator line between Plutonian day and night. The width of the strip ranges from 45 to 55 miles, depending on the perspective. Peak resolution is about 260 feet per pixel.

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2007 OR10 deserves a better name

Image: Dwarf planets compared
An illustration lines up the solar system’s four largest dwarf planets, with 2007 OR10 in the middle of the pack. (Credit: Andras Pal / Konkoly Observatory, Ivan Eder / Hungarian Astronomical Association, NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)

Observations made by NASA’s Kepler space telescope suggest that the icy world known as 2007 OR10 is bigger than astronomers thought –and that’s adding to the pressure to give the probable dwarf planet an official name, nine years after its discovery.

Some of the suggestions pick up on the recent controversy over a British ship-naming contest in which Boaty McBoatface emerged as the overwhelming favorite. So how about Dwarfplanety McDwarfplanetface, or Plutoid McPlutoface?

The cause of all this mirth is a research paper in the Astronomical Journal that provides a new size estimate for 2007 OR10, which lies far out in the Kuiper Belt, the broad ring of icy material just beyond Neptune. The object traces an eccentric orbit that takes 547.51 Earth years to complete, and ranges as far out as 66.9 times Earth’s distance from the sun (6.2 billion miles).

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Hubble spots dwarf planet Makemake’s moon

Image: Makemake and MK 2
An artist’s conception shows the distant dwarf planet Makemake with its dark moon, MK 2, lurking to the right. (Credit: NASA / ESA / A. Parker / SwRI)

Chalk up another moon for the dwarf planets: Astronomers have sifted through imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope to find a tiny satellite circling Makemake.

Makemake (pronounced Mah-kay-mah-kay, like the Rapa Nui deity after which it’s named) is one of the five dwarf planets recognized by the International Astronomical Union, along with Pluto, Eris, Haumea and Ceres. It’s more than 50 times farther away from the sun than Earth is, which translates to a distance of 4.8 billion miles.

With a diameter of 870 miles, Makemake is the third-largest known solar system object beyond the orbit of Neptune, in a wide ring of icy material called the Kuiper Belt. (Planet Nine, a.k.a. Planet X, would change the order if it exists, but it hasn’t yet been found.)

Like Eris, the dwarf planet that stirred up all the fuss over Pluto’s planetary status, Makemake was discovered in 2005 by a team led by Caltech astronomer Mike Brown. Like Pluto, Makemake is thought to be covered in frozen methane.

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Ceres’ mystery spots get their close-up

Image: Occator Crater
The bright central spots near the center of Occator Crater are shown in enhanced color in this view from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft. Such views can be used to highlight subtle color differences on Ceres’ surface. The view combines high-resolution images of Occator from February with lower-resolution color data from September. (Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA / PSI / LPI)

The scientists behind NASA’s Dawn mission today showed off their latest, greatest pictures of the dwarf planet Ceres, including close-up views of curious bright spots on the surface.

The car-sized Dawn spacecraft has been circling Ceres, the biggest mini-world in the solar system’s asteroid belt, for just more than a year. In Dawn’s distant views, the bright spots looked like alien headlights. The latest images, captured from a height of just 240 miles, reveal that the brightest spot is a fractured dome sticking up from 57-mile-wide Occator Crater.

Other bright areas appear to be highly reflective deposits, crisscrossed by linear features and fractures.

Dawn’s scientists discussed their latest data today at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.

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