The Planetary Society Blog
By Emily Lakdawalla
New maps of Pluto show pretty amazing amounts of surface change
Feb. 4, 2010 | 13:17 PST | 21:17 UTC
I just posted my writeup of today's press briefing on a new map of Pluto produced from Hubble images. The main conclusion was that Pluto has shown an astonishing amount of changes across its surface between 1994 and 2002 -- more, in fact, than any other solid surface in the solar system. An interesting perspective on the announcement, which concerned four years of computational work done by Marc Buie, was provided by Mike Brown. Buie said that the view of Pluto that we have from his new maps was comparable in resolution to our naked-eye view of the Moon. Brown pointed out how strange it would be if the Moon appeared to change in our sky as much as Pluto did in the six years spanning the two sets of observations: Comparison between 1994 and 2002-3 maps of PlutoThis animation blinks back and forth between two maps of Pluto's surface derived from Hubble Space Telescope observations. One map was generated from four images captured in 1994 using Hubble's Faint Object Camera, while the other was generated from 192 images captured in 2002 and 2003 using Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys. During the time that separated the two sets of observations, Pluto's surface changed noticeably. Also, the season advanced, bringing more of the south pole into winter darkness. Credit: NASA / ESA / M. Buie (SwRI) / animation by Emily Lakdawalla |
One thing I didn't mention in the news writeup was that Mike Brown, who goes by the Twitter handle "@plutokiller," was actually Tweeting away during the parts of the press briefing when he wasn't talking. (Tweeting while talking is something even he doesn't seem to be able to do -- and yes, that's a challenge, Mike.) So I Tweeted a question to him, about what question he thought I should ask at the briefing. He responded, recommending I ask why Pluto's northern hemisphere brightened. It was a question that apparently has stumped both Buie and Brown, and Buie's response to it provided one of the more imaginatively arresting phrases of the briefing: he speculated that as nitrogen sublimates from the northern hemisphere, it leaves behind a landscape of "fairy castle" spires of remnant nitrogen ice.
Coool! I can't wait until New Horizons gets there! Only five more years!
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Has anybody looked at what Pluto's state is likely to be when N.H. gets there, I.E. will all the volatiles at those temperatures have boiled off, or frozen back in 2015???
I'm almost done reading a book (Christmas present, thanks Dad!) about the 50's/60's race to get to orbit and the moon, "Space Race" by Deborah Cadbury. It uses the contrasts of competing program leaders Werner von Braun and Sergey Korolev to frame the story of the V2, rocket evolution, various US and USSR successes and failures, and so on. As they were designing the Apollo missions, one of their initial worries was that since nothing had yet landed (and survived) on the moon's surface, they had no confidence that it wouldn't just swallow up a lander. Fairy castles of dust, as it were.
Spoiler: we won! (sorry, Simpson's reference)
I'm watching that New Horizons countdown on dmuller.net !
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