SciWorks Radio is a production of 88.5 WFDD and SciWorks, the Science Center and Environmental Park of Forsyth County, located in Winston-Salem.
On July 14th, NASA's New Horizons space probe raced past the dwarf planet Pluto at 44 thousand miles per hour. Loaded with an array of science instruments, the sturdy little probe gathered data which will be sent to us over the next 16 months. This episode was recorded before NASA's recent press conference, but keep an eye on http://sciworks.org/pluto for up-to-date mission information. You'll also find a special web-only episode about the mission, and details specifically for this episode. What have we learned from New Horizons since the encounter?
Stunning new images show that Pluto and its moon Charon are far more interesting than we imagined. The surface is young, suggesting active geology. A now iconic image shows us Pluto's massive heart-shaped region, which NASA has named the Tombaugh Reggio.
It's named after Clyde Tombaugh, the man who discovered Pluto in 1930. That's an area of smooth, what appears to be ice, bordered by rough mountains and crater areas that are dark. So, we're in the process of taking a look at these to see what that material might be made out of. We've seen a couple of mountain ranges around the Tombaugh Reggio and one of those is about on the scale of the Rockies in terms of height, and the other is on the scale of the Appalachians.
That's Jonathan Ward, Volunteer NASA JPL Solar System Ambassador, and author of two brand new books about NASA's Apollo missions.
Pluto's surface, like the surface of many moons in the solar system, is made of super-hard water ice, which acts much like rock does here on Earth. Think of it as “Ice-Tectonics.” Some of those mountains have a depression on their peaks that look almost like craters on the tops of volcanoes. If indeed these are some sort of crater like that, they would be volcanoes of super-cold liquefied gasses, not lava volcanos. Again there's no appreciable heat inside Pluto that could create Earth-like volcanoes with molten rock. Many of the mountains and some of the land features look like they're coated with a very dark material, and that's probably the actual surface material. The other lighter materials that are overlaid on top of that are something else that is coming from either inside the planet or from another source. Some of the scientists are speculating already that this bright material has come from inside of Pluto, that it welled up from below the surface and then froze once it reached the surface of Pluto. There might be situations where this layer of ice might be sitting on top of other kinds of liquefied gasses that are below the surface.
The spacecraft has returned images of some very puzzling features.
There are large flat areas that are broken up into irregular polygons that are several kilometers across. We don't know if that's because of the surface collapsing irregularly, or if there's some heat source that's causing some of it to melt on the edge of that. Another thing we found out from Pluto is that its thin nitrogen atmosphere extends out almost a thousand miles from the surface of the planet. What we found out also is that the atmosphere is also being stripped off Pluto by interaction with the solar wind, but it's being replenished somehow and we think that's probably coming from inside Pluto.
Pluto's largest moon, Charon, is about half the size of Pluto, making it the largest moon in the solar system in relation to its host planet. With its 6-mile deep canyon and mysterious large surface depression, it looks like the inspiration for the Death Star.
It's darker material than Pluto. It's different than what we expected to see. Charon has one feature in one of the close-ups that has planetary scientists stumped. It appears to be something like a depression with a large mound inside of it. There's nothing like that anywhere on Earth or in the rest of the solar system that we've seen, so we're eagerly awaiting a more detailed image to get a better idea of what that might be.
New Horizons' initial offerings leave us with more questions than answers. But, over the next sixteen months, it will continue to send us a steady stream of data.
After that, the mission continues on into the Kuiper Belt. This region has trillions of objects made of ice and rock, which are remnants of the formation of our solar system.
We'll get some great data, however...
There's not enough fuel to maneuver it into a different type of orbit. They've found some that they can get within a couple million miles of and maybe get some measurements of, but nothing to get the kind of pictures that we've gotten of Pluto so far.
This Time Round, the theme music for SciWorks Radio, appears as a generous contribution by the band Storyman and courtesy of UFOmusic.com.
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