Pluto! (Part two, initial flyby results and some babbling) (Off-Topic)

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Sunday, July 19, 2015, 00:55 (3225 days ago)

When Voyager 1 visited Saturn in 1980, there were several possibilities for exit trajectory. It could have visited Uranus and Neptune, but as Voyager 2 was making this journey, other options were more interesting. Another more attractive destination was Pluto. However, the Pioneer program had just recently discovered evidence for a funky atmosphere on Saturn's moon Titan, and NASA decided to have Voyager make a closer investigation. The probe made a close flyby of Titan, but this left it on an unavoidable trajectory out of the plane of the ecliptic, on a blazing fast journey toward nothing in particular.

Pluto is a member of the Kuiper Belt, a region of the solar system containing many small cold worlds of rock and metal and ice. Decades after Voyager's visit to Saturn, we had still not made close investigations of any Kuiper Belt Objects.

Launched in 2006, the New Horizons probe was launched to change this. Its primary mission is to investigate the Pluto system. Although New Horizons is a smaller and shorter-lived probe than something like the Voyagers, its power source should permit it to investigate another Kuiper Belt Object five or so years after the Pluto flyby.

Anyway, the Pluto flyby happened a few days ago. First off, let's take what's pretty much existed as a vague blur since 1930 and ENHANCE (this picture was published just before the close flyby itself):

And Pluto's smaller buddy Charon:

Anyway, they've made some cool observations. The really big one being the shocking amount of non-cratered surface; many people thought that these small worlds would be long geologically dead, but there are regions which appear to be young, including large mountains.

Charon's makeup is different, but it also isn't very cratered. Speaking of Charon, wat.

Atmospheric data has also started to come in, showing that Pluto has a very extended nitrogen atmosphere.

Currently announcements are extremely preliminary; because of the crappy wifi in deep space, it'll actually take a year before New Horizons finishes sending all of the high-fidelity data captured during the flyby. But data is constantly streaming in and analysis is constantly happening, so expect cool stuff.

If you want news on said cool stuff, NASA's website is nice and direct, even if they seriously need to clean up their insane erratic story feed:
http://www.nasa.gov/

Another upcoming arrival at a prominent system:

Jupiter has been visited a number of times, but it's a fascinatingly active world that has lot to tell us. A probe called Juno is on its way and will arrive next year. Juno will use a ridiculously eccentric orbit, allowing it to make very close passes of Jupiter's poles, within a couple thousand miles.
Included in its repertoire, Juno is fitted with a visible-range camera that should get some sick cloud pics.

Also...

Also, since I mentioned Voyager earlier. When the Voyager probes were launched in the 70s, they were each equipped with a bank of 3 large radioisotope thermal generators. So large that the plutonium is still giving off enough heat to keep several instruments and their communication systems up and running; they're actually predicted to last until at least 2025. They're literally almost going to outlive New Horizons.
This is cool because the Voyager probes are going REALLY FAST away from us. Voyager 1 is the most distant probe we have; it exited the Sun's plasma heliosphere a couple years ago, and is now talking to us from the interstellar medium. Voyager 2 is likely going to cross the same boundary in the next few years, and importantly, it has more still-functional plasma-measuring instrumentation than Voyager 1 does. So these ancient, uh, Voyagers are going to keep telling us things about the interface between our Sun and the rest of the galaxy.
Which might not sound that exciting, so here's a picture showing how the plasma bubbles around stars slice through interstellar space with huge bow shocks, just like boats through water:

That's what the Voyager program is now trying to analyze, sort of.