Pluto Team Updates Science From the Solar System's Edge - by b0yle
Scientists are still sifting through the data from the Pluto flyby, and from the Arrokoth flyby on New Year’s Day of 2019, more than 4 billion miles from the sun.Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute who serves as the mission’s principal investigator, said that close study of Arrokoth’s structure has yielded fresh insights about the early days of the solar system.
“The individual lobes have similar properties … which is a clue to their origin, which we believe is telling us something very important about the formation of Arrokoth,” Stern said. “And it’s this, namely, that as the cloud of material that came to make Arrokoth was collapsing … that cloud apparently produced like-sized objects, those mounds, which came together to form the larger lobe.”
The New Horizons team analyzed the distribution of mass on Pluto — and determined that the formation of Sputnik Planitia, a sea of frozen nitrogen that forms part of the dwarf planet’s distinctive heart-shaped feature, probably played a key role in the polar flip. Mishra and his colleagues found that the properties associated with the bladed terrain imaged in detail by New Horizons during closest approach — for example, methane absorption and surface roughness — were also present in wider areas on Pluto’s “far side.”Upper image shows Pluto’s bladed terrain. Lower image shows features known as penitentes. Figure from Moores et al., Nature, 2017.
“Pale Blue Dot” images could track cloud patterns on Uranus and Neptune. Credit: Grundy et al. / Lowell Observatory / NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI Stern noted that New Horizons has moved beyond the faint, hazy glow of sunlight scattered by interplanetary dust — the so-called zodiacal light. “That dust scattering in the inner solar system is like a fog that prevents you from seeing the very faintest emissions from the universe,” he said.
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