NASA

Pluto: First, best look at a mysterious world

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Photo: Pluto as seen by NASA's New Horizons, July 13, 2015
New Horizons’ View of Pluto, July 13, 2015 – Credits: NASA/APL/SwRI

Pluto nearly fills the frame in this image from the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) aboard NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, taken on July 13, 2015 when the spacecraft was 476,000 miles (768,000 kilometers) from the surface. This is the last and most detailed image sent to Earth before the spacecraft’s closest approach to Pluto on July 14. The color image has been combined with lower-resolution color information from the Ralph instrument that was acquired earlier on July 13. This view is dominated by the large, bright feature informally named the “heart,” which measures approximately 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) across. The heart borders darker equatorial terrains, and the mottled terrain to its east (right) are complex. However, even at this resolution, much of the heart’s interior appears remarkably featureless — possibly a sign of ongoing geologic processes.

After a decade-long journey through our solar system, New Horizons made its closest approach to Pluto Tuesday, about 7,750 miles above the surface making it the first-ever space mission to explore a world so far from Earth. The three-billion-mile journey took about one minute less than predicted when the craft was launched in January 2006. The spacecraft threaded the needle through a 36-by-57 mile (60 by 90 kilometers) window in space — the equivalent of a commercial airliner arriving no more off target than the width of a tennis ball.

Photo: Clyde Tombaugh
Clyde Tombaugh

The Pluto story began only a generation ago when young Clyde Tombaugh was tasked to look for Planet X, theorized to exist beyond the orbit of Neptune. He discovered a faint point of light that we now see as a complex and fascinating world. As a tribute to Tombaugh, who died in 1997 at age 90, a tiny canister of his ashes was placed inside the New Horizons spacecraft.

“Pluto was discovered just 85 years ago by a farmer’s son from Kansas, inspired by a visionary from Boston, using a telescope in Flagstaff, Arizona,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “Today, science takes a great leap observing the Pluto system up close and flying into a new frontier that will help us better understand the origins of the solar system.”

New Horizons’ flyby of the dwarf planet and its five known moons is providing an up-close introduction to the solar system’s Kuiper Belt, an outer region populated by icy objects ranging in size from boulders to dwarf planets. Kuiper Belt objects, such as Pluto, preserve evidence about the early formation of the solar system.

Exciting images of Pluto’s largest moon — or co-dwarf planet — Charon were also captured.

Photo: Pluto's largest moon, Charon. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI
Charon, Pluto’s Largest “Moon” – Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

Remarkable new details of Pluto’s largest moon Charon are revealed in this image from New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), taken late on July 13, 2015 from a distance of 289,000 miles.

A swath of cliffs and troughs stretches about 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) from left to right, suggesting widespread fracturing of Charon’s crust, likely a result of internal processes. At upper right, along the moon’s curving edge, is a canyon estimated to be four to six miles (seven to nine kilometers) deep.

New Horizons traveled more than three billion miles over nine-and-a-half years to reach the Pluto system.

Spacecraft returns early images hinting surface features on Pluto, possible polar cap

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Pluto and Charon. Credits: NASA/JHU-APL/SwRI
Click for Full-Size View. Credits: NASA/JHU-APL/SwRI

For the first time, images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft are revealing bright and dark regions on the surface of faraway Pluto – the primary target of the New Horizons close flyby in mid-July.

The images were captured in early to mid-April from within 70 million miles (113 million kilometers), using the telescopic Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) camera on New Horizons. A technique called image deconvolution sharpens the raw, unprocessed images beamed back to Earth. New Horizons scientists interpreted the data to reveal the dwarf planet has broad surface markings – some bright, some dark – including a bright area at one pole that may be a polar cap.

“As we approach the Pluto system we are starting to see intriguing features such as a bright region near Pluto’s visible pole, starting the great scientific adventure to understand this enigmatic celestial object,” says John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “As we get closer, the excitement is building in our quest to unravel the mysteries of Pluto using data from New Horizons.”

Also captured in the images is Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, rotating in its 6.4-day long orbit. The exposure times used to create this image set – a tenth of a second – were too short for the camera to detect Pluto’s four much smaller and fainter moons.

Since it was discovered in 1930, Pluto has remained an enigma. It orbits our sun more than 3 billion miles (about 5 billion kilometers) from Earth, and researchers have struggled to discern any details about its surface. These latest New Horizons images allow the mission science team to detect clear differences in brightness across Pluto’s surface as it rotates.

“After traveling more than nine years through space, it’s stunning to see Pluto, literally a dot of light as seen from Earth, becoming a real place right before our eyes,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “These incredible images are the first in which we can begin to see detail on Pluto, and they are already showing us that Pluto has a complex surface.”

The images the spacecraft returns will dramatically improve as New Horizons speeds closer to its July rendezvous with Pluto.

“We can only imagine what surprises will be revealed when New Horizons passes approximately 7,800 miles (12,500 kilometers) above Pluto’s surface this summer,” said Hal Weaver, the mission’s project scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.

From a NASA news release.

Close encounter with Jupiter

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Photo: Jupiter with moons, by David Watkins.
Near opposition: Jupiter along with Europa, Ganymede, and Io. On a frigid February night, CAA member David Watkins used his 5X Powermate on his 8-inch Celestron to view the Jupiter atmosphere as he had never seen it before! From Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio.

by Dr. Tony Phillips

February 6, 2015 — Every 13 months, Earth and Jupiter have a close encounter. Astronomers call it an “opposition” because Jupiter is opposite the Sun in the sky. Our solar system’s largest gas planet rises in the east at sunset, and soars overhead at midnight, shining brighter than any star in the night sky.

This year’s opposition of Jupiter occurs on Feb. 6. It isn’t an ordinary close encounter with Earth (approximately 640 million kilometers), but in Feb. 2015, Jupiter is edge on to the Sun.

Jupiter’s opposition on Feb. 6 coincides almost perfectly with its equinox on Feb. 5 when the Sun crosses Jupiter’s equatorial plane. It is an edge-on apparition of the giant planet that sets the stage for a remarkable series of events. For the next couple of months, backyard sky watchers can see the moons of Jupiter executing a complex series of mutual eclipses and transits.

The eclipses have already started. On Jan. 24, for example, three of Jupiter’s moon’s, Io, Europa, and Callisto, cast their inky-black shadows on Jupiter’s swirling cloudtops. The “triple shadow transit” happened while Jupiter was high in the sky over North America, and many backyard astronomers watched the event.

As Earth’s crosses the plane of Jupiter’s equator in the weeks and months ahead, there will be many mutual events. For instance, on Feb. 5, volcanic Io will cast its shadow on Mercury-sized Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. On Feb. 7, icy Europa, home to what may be the solar system’s largest underground ocean, will cast its shadow on Io. Events like these will continue, off and on, until July 2015.

During the last edge-on apparition in 2009, some observers managed to obtain the first resolved time-lapse videos of mutual phenomena. Experienced amateur astronomers recorded satellites ducking in and out of one another’s shadows, moons in partial and total eclipse, and multiple shadows playing across the face of Jupiter. Backyard telescopes have come a long way in the past six years, so even better movies can be expected this time.

You don’t have to be an experienced astronomer to experience Jupiter’s opposition. Anyone can see the bright planet rising in the east at sunset. It outshines by far anything else in its patch of sky. Point a small telescope at the bright light and, voila!–there are Jupiter’s cloud belts and storms, and the pinprick lights of the Galilean satellites circling the gas giant below.

Try it; 640 million kilometers won’t seem so far away at all.

Credit: Science@NASA

Hubble revisits iconic “Pillars of Creation” image

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Photo: Iconic "Pillars of Creation" reimaged. Credit: NASA, ESA/Hubble and the Hubble Heritage Team
New view of the Pillars of Creation — Visible Light. Click to Enlarge.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured many breathtaking images of the Universe, but one snapshot stands out from the rest: the Eagle Nebula’s Pillars of Creation. In 1995 Hubble’s iconic image revealed never-before-seen details in the giant columns and now the telescope is kickstarting its 25th year in orbit with an even clearer, and more stunning, image of these beautiful structures.

The three impressive towers of gas and dust captured in this image are part of the Eagle Nebula, otherwise known as Messier 16. Although such features are not uncommon in star-forming regions, the Messier 16 structures are by far the most photogenic and evocative ever captured. The Hubble image of the pillars taken in 1995 is so popular that it has appeared in film and television, on tee-shirts and pillows, and even on postage stamps.

Now Hubble has revisited the famous pillars, capturing the multi-colored glow of gas clouds, wispy tendrils of dark cosmic dust, and the rust-colored elephants’ trunks with the newer Wide Field Camera 3, installed in 2009. The visible-light image builds on one of the most iconic astronomy images ever taken and provides astronomers with an even sharper and wider view.

In addition to this new visible-light image, Hubble has also produced a bonus image. This image is taken in infrared light, which penetrates much of the obscuring dust and gas and unveils a more unfamiliar view of the pillars, transforming them into wispy silhouettes set against a background peppered with stars. Here newborn stars, hidden in the visible-light view, can be seen forming within the pillars themselves.

Photos: The Pillars of Creation, New and Old. Credit: NASA, ESA/Hubble and the Hubble Heritage Team
The Pillars of Creation – New and Old

Although the original image was dubbed the “Pillars of Creation”, this new image hints that they are also pillars of destruction. The dust and gas in these pillars is seared by intense radiation from the young stars forming within them, and eroded by strong winds from massive nearby stars. The ghostly bluish haze around the dense edges of the pillars in the visible-light view is material that is being heated by bright young stars and evaporating away.

With these new images come better contrast and clearer views of the region. Astronomers can use these new images to study how the physical structure of the pillars is changing over time. The infrared image shows that the reason the pillars exist is because the very ends of them are dense, and they shadow the gas below them, creating the long, pillar-like structures. The gas in between the pillars has long since been blown away by the winds from a nearby star cluster.

At the top edge of the left-hand pillar, a gaseous fragment has been heated up and is flying away from the structure, highlighting the violent nature of star-forming regions.

These massive stars may be slowly destroying the pillars but they are also the reason Hubble sees the structures at all. They radiate enough ultraviolet light to illuminate the area and make the clouds of oxygen, hydrogen and sulphur glow.

Although structures like these exist throughout the Universe, the Pillars of Creation — at a distance of 6,500 light-years away — provide the best, and most dramatic, example. Now, these images have allowed us to see them more clearly than ever, proving that at 25 years of age, Hubble is still going strong.

This image and the associated results were presented today at the 225th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington, USA.