А теперь к Плутону (АМС New Horizons / Новые горизонты)

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SwRI researchers discover new evidence for complex molecules on Pluto's surface

Boulder, Colo. — Dec. 20, 2011 —The new and highly sensitive Cosmic Origins Spectrograph aboard the Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a strong ultraviolet-wavelength absorber on Pluto's surface, providing new evidence that points to the possibility of complex hydrocarbon and/or nitrile molecules lying on the surface, according to a paper recently published in the Astronomical Journal by researchers from Southwest Research Institute and Nebraska Wesleyan University.

Such chemical species can be produced by the interaction of sunlight or cosmic rays with Pluto's known surface ices, including methane, carbon monoxide and nitrogen.

The project, led by SwRI's Dr. Alan Stern, also included SwRI researchers Dr. John Spencer and Adam Shinn, and Nebraska Wesleyan University researchers Dr. Nathaniel Cunningham and student Mitch Hain.

"This is an exciting finding because complex Plutonian hydrocarbons and other molecules that could be responsible for the ultraviolet spectral features we found with Hubble may, among other things, be responsible for giving Pluto its ruddy color," said Stern.

The team also discovered evidence of changes in Pluto's ultraviolet spectrum compared to Hubble measurements from the 1990s. The changes may be related to differing terrains seen now versus in the 1990s, or to other effects, such as changes in the surface related to a steep increase in the pressure of Pluto's atmosphere during that same time span.

"The discovery we made with Hubble reminds us that even more exciting discoveries about Pluto's composition and surface evolution are likely to be in store when NASA's New Horizons spacecraft arrives at Pluto in 2015," Stern added.

This research was supported by a grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Editors: A copy of the science paper by Stern et al. is available at http://iopscience.iop.org/1538-3881/143/1/22/ . For more information about NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto, go to http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/ .

Images to accompany this story: www.swri.org/press/2011/pluto.htm .

http://www.swri.org/9what/releases/2011/pluto.htm

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На поверхности Плутона могут быть органические молекулы

Новый высокочувствительный ультрафиолетовый спектрограф Cosmic Origins, установленный на космическом телескопе «Хаббл», выявил на поверхности Плутона нечто, поглощающее ультрафиолетовые волны.

Опекуны инструмента из Юго-Западного исследовательского института (США) полагают, что это указывает на возможность существования сложных углеводородных и (или) нитриловых молекул.

Подобные соединения способны образоваться в результате взаимодействия солнечного света и космических лучей с поверхностным льдом Плутона, который состоит в основном из метана, окиси углерода и азота. Открытие интригует тем, что именно сложные углеводороды и прочие молекулы, дающие соответствующий спектр, могут нести ответственность за загадочный «румянец» карликовой планеты. Стоит отметить, что другие объекты пояса Койпера тоже имеют красноватый оттенок.

Неужели это действительно органика?

Кроме того, обнаружены изменения в ультрафиолетовом спектре Плутона по сравнению с тем, что показывал «Хаббл» в 1990-х годах. Это может быть связано как с тем, что на сей раз обозревалась иная местность, так и с трансформациями собственно поверхности — скажем, из-за резкого повышения атмосферного давления.

Так или иначе, но открытие ещё раз напомнило, насколько захватывающим должно стать сближение зонда НАСА «Новые горизонты» с Плутоном, намеченное на 2015 год. 14 июля аппарат подойдёт к карликовой планете на 12,5 тыс. км, если, конечно, не случится ничего экстраординарного.

http://science.compulenta.ru/652568/
http://www.swri.org/9what/releases/2011/pluto.htm
http://iopscience.iop.org/1538-3881/143/1/22/

[sol]

Плутон - просто мегакомета

[Petrovich]

Плутон - просто мегакомета

Долетим, увидим  :wink:
Но мысль интересная  

[Потусторонний]

Плутон - просто мегакомета

А хвост у нее был?

[fon Butterfly]

Плутон - просто мегакомета

А хвост у нее был?

Дык уже ж была где-то публикация: засекли "хвост" - улетающую сезонную атмосферу...

http://rnd.cnews.ru/natur_science/news/top/index_science.shtml?2011/04/26/438041

[pkl]

Мегакомета - это, скорее, Осирис:


А Плутон похоже, никогда сколько-нибудь существенно не нагревался.

[sol]

Плутон - просто мегакомета

А хвост у нее был?

Наличие хвоста - необязательный атрибут кометы.

Особенно на таких расстояниях...

[ronatu]

Плутон - просто мегакомета

А хвост у нее был?

Наличие хвоста - необязательный атрибут кометы.

Особенно на таких расстояниях...

3000 км в диаметре снежный ком... :wink:

[Иэсэсовец]

Скажите не посвященному, пожалуйста, а  Новые горизонты смогут, если что, подтвердить наличие органики на Плутоне? Той, которую  Хаббл разглядел намедни.

[Потусторонний]

Скажите не посвященному, пожалуйста, а  Новые горизонты смогут, если что, подтвердить наличие органики на Плутоне? Той, которую  Хаббл разглядел намедни.

"New Horizon's spectrometers will help us identify the kinds of organic molecules on Pluto. We expect to find something pretty interesting."
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-09-dwarf-planet-mysteries-beckon-horizons.html

[Иэсэсовец]

Скажите не посвященному, пожалуйста, а  Новые горизонты смогут, если что, подтвердить наличие органики на Плутоне? Той, которую  Хаббл разглядел намедни.

"New Horizon's spectrometers will help us identify the kinds of organic molecules on Pluto. We expect to find something pretty interesting."
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-09-dwarf-planet-mysteries-beckon-horizons.html

Спасибо. Будем вместе с мистером Смитом ждать "чего-нибудь интересного". На халяву-то...

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New Horizons Team Remembers Patsy Tombaugh
January 16, 2012

It was January 2006, just days before the New Horizons spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. A reporter asked Patsy Tombaugh, widow of Pluto's discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh, what her husband might have thought about the first mission to the planet he found in 1930.

"He'd be very happy about it," she said, "because he'd really want to know what they were finding out about Pluto."

Today, the team fulfilling that wish mourns Patsy Tombaugh, who died Jan. 12 in Las Cruces, N.M. She was 99.

"I will never forget Patsy's enthusiasm in New Horizons and her pride in what we're doing," said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator, from the Southwest Research Institute. "I'll also never forget her smile and winning way. On behalf of the entire New Horizons team, I want to express our condolences to Patsy's family and friends, and to say that when we explore Pluto in three years, she will be as much on our minds and in our hearts, as she is today."

Patricia "Patsy" Edson met Clyde Tombaugh in the spring of 1933; her older brother James and Clyde were astronomy majors at the University of Kansas, and good friends. They married in June 1934; daughter Annette was born in 1940 and son Alden in 1945. But, as Patsy wrote in a 2005 New Horizons web story, their "family" seemed much larger.
 
"Living with Clyde Tombaugh was like having the celestial universe in the next room, but I found it a very good neighbor," she wrote.

"Of course, I always had to share Clyde not only with Mars, Jupiter, the Moon, and stars, but also with the public. As the Space Age grew so did Clyde's fan mail. From all over this world came letters from all age groups asking for information or autographs. He once said that he had received at least 30,000 letters. He tried to answer each one."

Clyde died in 1997. In addition to her son and daughter, Patsy is survived by five grandchildren, nine great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild. A memorial service is planned for Feb. 12 in Las Cruces.



Awaiting the launch of the New Horizons spacecraft from Kennedy Space Center/Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., in January 2006, Patsy Tombaugh points toward Pluto. (Image: Michael Soluri)

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/20120116.php

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https://twitter.com/#!/NewHorizons2015/status/159683599627591680

New Horizons launched 6 years ago this week on Thursday-- Go New Horizons! Go NASA! Go America! Go humankind!

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Late Cruise!
January 19, 2012

Today – as we mark the sixth anniversary of our launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, on January 19, 2006 – New Horizons remains healthy and on course, now more than 22 times as far from the Sun as the Earth is.

Our nine-year flight from launch to the beginning of Pluto encounter in January 2015 is two-thirds over. As a result, we're entering the final three-year segment of our long interplanetary trek from Earth to Pluto, called "Late Cruise."

Even as we enter Late Cruise, I can already feel the pace of activities picking up. As you read this, New Horizons is awake and being put through various test activities during a record-length, monthlong January hibernation wakeup, and all is going well. When this wakeup ends, we'll cruise in hibernation through February, March and April while planning an intensive two-month wakeup that will span May and June.

The highlight of this summer's wakeup will be a "24 hour" near-encounter rehearsal, during which we'll execute a (nearly) daylong segment of our Pluto encounter sequence on the spacecraft. During this test – our first in-flight encounter rehearsal – New Horizons will make every maneuver, every scan and every observation that it actually will do around closest approach in 2015. Following that rehearsal, recorded engineering and science data will be played back to Earth and be used to search for even the tiniest discrepancies from plan.

In addition to the rehearsal, we'll check out every system (and its backup) on New Horizons; check out each of the seven scientific instruments; collect more science data than we have in any previous wakeup; and update the software for our primary spacecraft command and control computer, removing a bug that occasionally causes it to reset. As if that's not enough, we'll also uplink almost two-dozen improvements to our onboard autonomous fault detection and automatic response software, many of which are necessary to begin encounter-sequence testing and to carry out the encounter itself. All of these activities need to go well to put us in good shape for a complete, nine-day encounter rehearsal in 2013.

Also this summer, planetary scientists on and collaborating with the New Horizons team will use a wide variety of telescopes to intensively probe the space between Pluto and Charon for possible satellites, rings and other kinds of debris structures.

And while the science team is looking for Pluto system hazards, our spacecraft engineering team, under the leadership of Chris Hersman from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, will begin to work through some 260-plus malfunction and contingency scenarios that we've identified as possible "gotchas" at Pluto. For each scenario, the team will prepare and test automatic onboard or ground-control responses. And our mission operations ("mission ops") team, led by Alice Bowman at APL, will complete plans for the two weeks of flight that surround either side of our nine-day-long closest approach sequence at Pluto.

Working with our Pluto Encounter Planning team, led by Deputy Project Scientist Leslie Young at Southwest Research Institute, the mission ops group will also prioritize and then write command sequences that create the almost-yearlong data playback that will occur after the encounter concludes in late summer 2015.

The data New Horizons sends back — maps, spectra, plasma data, radio science and more — will provide a detailed view of Pluto and its system of moons. Our knowledge of Pluto will literally expand from a single fact sheet's worth of information, to textbook-length tomes.

When we started this journey in January 2006, the nearly decade-long cruise to the Pluto system seemed daunting indeed. But with six years behind us, and only three years to go, we on New Horizons are actually worried about how little time we have to complete all that's left to do! After all, starting this year and carrying through 2013, 2014 and 2015, the pace of activity will continue to accelerate! Soon, we'll actually be hiring new staff to help us take on much of that work.

Time flies, and so does New Horizons!

Well, that's my update for now. Thanks again for following our journey across the deep ocean of space, to a truly new frontier.

I hope you'll keep on exploring — just as we do!

-Alan Stern

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/overview/piPerspective.php?page=piPerspective_01_19_2012

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NASA Spacecraft in Home Stretch of Journey to Pluto
http://www.space.com/14289-nasa-pluto-spacecraft-horizons-anniversary.html

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Our 2nd & final New Horizons-DSN radio science lunar occultation test with the DSN was successfully conducted this morning-- Go NH, Go DSN!

https://twitter.com/#!/NewHorizons2015/status/160827417227821056

[Иэсэсовец]

NASA Spacecraft in Home Stretch of Journey to Pluto
http://www.space.com/14289-nasa-pluto-spacecraft-horizons-anniversary.html

Интересная статья. Зависть берет от того, что у них все летает, все получается. Потому что они - команда. У нас в такой ситуации команду распустили бы до 2015 года, а потом набрали новую. И получили бы соответствующий результат.

уПС
Несколько разочаровала картинка художника с плутоническим пейзажем. Мне кажется, что художник в плену стереотипов. Или рисовал сие полотно с натуры где-нибудь вблизи северного полюса планеты Земля.
Как говориться, найдите 10 отличий.

[Дмитрий Виницкий]

А в чём по вашему, должна выражаться разница?
Особенно, если вы сравниваете полдень на Плутоне с ночью на Земле? :wink:

[Иэсэсовец]

А в чём по вашему, должна выражаться разница?
Особенно, если вы сравниваете полдень на Плутоне с ночью на Земле? :wink:

Пфф.. А где гигантские летающие  пиявки? А где сумчатый ягель, степенно ползущий по метановым торосам?