{"id":16107,"date":"2015-08-26T19:51:25","date_gmt":"2015-08-26T11:51:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/scientists-eager-for-restart-of-pluto-photo-pipeline\/"},"modified":"2015-08-26T19:51:25","modified_gmt":"2015-08-26T11:51:25","slug":"scientists-eager-for-restart-of-pluto-photo-pipeline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/scientists-eager-for-restart-of-pluto-photo-pipeline\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists eager for restart of Pluto photo pipeline"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Four
Four images from New Horizons\u2019 Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with color data from the Ralph instrument to create this global view of Pluto. (The lower right edge of Pluto in this view currently lacks high-resolution color coverage.) The images, taken when the spacecraft was 280,000 miles (450,000 kilometers) away, show features as small as 1.4 miles (2.2 kilometers). Credit: NASA\/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory\/Southwest Research Institute<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The first images from the New Horizons spacecraft since late July will come back to Earth on Sept. 5, and scientists are salivating over what the new pictures will reveal about Pluto.<\/p>\n

Only about 5 percent of the 50 gigabits of data New Horizons collected during its nine-day encounter with Pluto has made it back to Earth, said Alan Stern, the mission\u2019s principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute.<\/p>\n

\u201cNinety-five percent of all the data are still on the spacecraft,\u201d Stern said Tuesday. \u201cAll the best images are still on the spacecraft, all the high-resolution mapping, almost all the high-resolution composition mapping, the vast majority of radio occultation data are still on spacecraft, (along with) observations of the small moons and Charon.\u201d<\/p>\n

Only seven close-up images of Pluto from New Horizons\u2019 sharp-eyed telescopic camera have been downlinked to Earth, and those files were compressed to expedite their transmission back home.<\/p>\n

The faraway New Horizons spacecraft, now more than 3 billion miles from Earth, can only send back data at a rate of about 2 kilobits per second, a fraction of the speed of dial-up Internet. It will take more than a year for the robotic emissary to broadcast all its measurements, including hundreds of images, to eager scientists on the ground.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlmost everything is still on the spacecraft, so we have just sampled this dessert with a few days of intensive download right after the flyby,\u201d Stern said in a presentation Tuesday to a NASA-sponsored group of planetary scientists focused on the outer solar system.<\/p>\n

New Horizons spent the last six weeks beaming back data on the plasma and dust environment it encountered around Pluto, crucial measurements that will help piece together the distant world\u2019s workings and place in the solar system.<\/p>\n

During its July 14 flyby, the mission discovered a vast Texas-sized ice plan informally named Sputnik Planum. Shaped ice blocks \u2014 called polygons by mission scientsts \u2014 make up the frozen, craterless terrain, leading geologists to believe the ice field formed less than 100 million years ago, and may still be changing today.<\/p>\n

Data stored on New Horizons\u2019 recorders include much higher-resolution views of Sputnik Planum, along with spectral readings that will reveal what types of ices comprise the ice field. The information will help narrow down the age of Sputnik Planum, which tapers toward a boundary with rugged mountains of water ice in the north.<\/p>\n

The polygons in Sputnuk Planum may form from slow bubbling driven by a mysterious underground heat source. Scientists want to know if there is a liquid ocean underneath the ice sheet, which is mainly composed of nitrogen, methane and carbon monoxide ices at temperatures near minus 391 degrees Fahrenheit.<\/p>\n

\"New
New Horizons\u2019 flyby of Pluto revealed unexpected terrain, such as these blocky patches of ice at a region dubbed Sputnik Planum. New Horizons\u2019 LORRI camera took this image from a distance of 48,000 miles (77,00 kilometers) on July 14. The resolution is about 1 kilometer (0.6 miles). Credit: NASA\/JHUAPL\/SWRI<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The best images of Sputnik Planum on the ground show the region with a resolution of about 400 meters (1,300 feet), but New Horizons\u2019 black-and-white camera took pictures with resolutions as high as 70 meters (230 feet), good enough to see something as small as the ponds in New York City\u2019s Central Park.<\/p>\n

The camera also captured images in stereo pairs \u2014 viewing the same place on Pluto from slightly different angles \u2014 to allow scientists to get an idea of the topography.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe polygons may be related to some sort of thermal convection,\u201d Stern said. \u201cWe will see. We will know a lot more about this, and actually get 3D imagery to know what\u2019s higher and what\u2019s lower before the year is out.\u201d<\/p>\n

The next set of Pluto images are due to arrive on Earth around Sept. 5, according to William McKinnon, a planetary geologist at Washington University in St. Louis who works on the New Horizons mission.<\/p>\n

Scientists have a wish list of things they are eager to see once the photo pipeline resumes.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is so much stuff on-board that I just cannot wait to see,\u201d said Cathy Olkin, New Horizons\u2019 deputy project scientist from the Southwest Research Institute. \u201cOne of the things I\u2019m really looking forward to the most is our high-resolution scan that we took of Pluto with the LEISA instrument \u2026 it\u2019s the infrared spectrometer.<\/p>\n

\u201cBeing able to get high-resolution infrared spectroscopy across the surface of Pluto to map those ices and to see what other minor species might be there, that we couldn\u2019t detect when we\u2019re looking at Pluto as a point of light from Earth,\u201d Olkin said Wednesday in a Google Hangout hosted by the Kavli Foundation. \u201cThat\u2019s one I\u2019m really looking forward to getting down.\u201d<\/p>\n

Richard Binzel, a New Horizons co-investigator based at MIT, said he is waiting to see observations of Pluto\u2019s night side made by the spacecraft after the flyby. Scientists hoped sunlight reflected by Pluto\u2019s moon Charon would dimly illuminate the south pole\u2019s ice cap, which is locked in a dark, century-long winter.<\/p>\n

New Horizons also got close-up views of Charon on its way by Pluto.<\/p>\n

The plutonium-powered space probe, about the size of a baby grand piano, sped by Pluto at 31,000 mph at a range of 7,700 miles. It approached within about 18,000 miles from Charon.<\/p>\n

Only a handful of close-up views of Charon, which is more than half the size of Pluto at 790 miles acrss, have been returned from New Horizons so far. The images revealed giant chasms bigger than the Grand Canyon, a patch of puzzling dark material at its north pole and a sunlit hemisphere with few craters.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to see those global high-resolution uncompressed images of Charon and really see where these big cracks have flowed out onto the surface, and maybe get some composition on what those flows might have been,\u201d said Michael Brown, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology who specializes in studying the Kuiper Belt, a ring of mini-worlds at the outer edge of the solar system where Pluto resides.<\/p>\n

Brown discovered the dwarf planet Eris, an object more massive than Pluto but not quite as big, in 2005. The discovery prompted the International Astronomical Union\u2019s decision in 2006 to demote Pluto into a new class of worlds called dwarf planets.<\/p>\n

Brown said observations of Charon could help scientists learn about many other similar-sized objects in the Kuiper Belt.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that\u2019s going to tell us a lot about the mid-sized objects around the Kuiper Belt,\u201d Brown said in Wednesday\u2019s Google Hangout. \u201cThere are many, many Charon-like objects out there, and I\u2019d like to learn more about all of them by looking at those images.\u201d<\/p>\n

Email the author.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Four images from New Horizons\u2019 Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with color data from the Ralph instrument to create this global view of Pluto. (The lower right edge of Pluto in this view currently lacks high-resolution color coverage.) The images, taken when the spacecraft was 280,000 miles (450,000 kilometers) away, show features as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2172,2173,2174,2848],"class_list":["post-16107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-charon","tag-kuiper-belt","tag-new-horizons","tag-pluto"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16107"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16107"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16107\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}