New Horizons leader on Pluto: We get an A for exploration, but an F for predictions

[mhatrw]

Source: Orlando Sentinel

The fiirst science paper to describe Pluto and its satellites after the New Horizons flyby has been released, just three months after the NASA spacecraft made its historic encounter with the dwarf-planet system. The paper, published in Science, presents Pluto as a world of mystery and extremes, with high mountains, steep cliffs and glaciers of frozen nitrogen leaving paths across the planet's surface.

Parts of Pluto are pockmarked with large craters, but there are also vast smooth plains that suggest the petite planet may still be geologically active -- something scientists did not anticipate and cannot yet explain. "We searched for craters [on the plains], and there are none," said Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., who is the principal investigator for the New Horizons mission. "That means that it was created yesterday on geological time scales."

For most icy satellites in our solar system, the resurfacing that would erase evidence of old impact craters is associated with heat generated by the gravitational push and pull of their host planets. But the researchers say that explanation does not work for Pluto. "It is really puzzling that it is still active," said Stern, who is also the first author on the paper. "We don't know how to make that happen."

...

"We get an A for exploration, but an F for properly predicting what we'd see," he said.

Read more: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/space/go-for-launch/la-sci-sn-pluto-science-paper-20151012-story.html

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In my humble opinion, otherwise unexplained geological life implies terraforming microbial life.

I think that Pluto is infested with microbes, and that those microbes are transforming Pluto so that it becomes more and more habitable for microbial life.

[Tom Kitten]

1. Interesting

Your concept about Pluto reminds me of a world described in the novel The Reefs of Space, by Frederick Pohl, described better than I could here http://urbanhonking.com/spacecanon/2009/08/19/the_reefs_of_space/

Truly fascinating, like a "fairyland"...I also think along the same lines concerning the oceans of Europa, the fountains of Enceladus...

[Spitfire of ATJ]

2. It has a unusually extended atmosphere....

How about "wind" as the reason?

[GoneFishin]

3. Wow. That is unusual.

[eppur_se_muova]

8. That's an *extremely* thin atmosphere, due to the low mass --> weak gravitational field.

The stronger the gravity, the steeper the pressure gradient in the atmosphere. Any wind on pluto will be unlikely to be perceptible. And only a few substances will be gasses at those temperatures.

You can safely assume the color/density scale on those two diagrams is NOT the same.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

9. There are sandstorms on Mars and it has a thin atmosphere....

I was thinking over millions of years it could explain why small craters could fade.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

4. When I was in university I went to a debate about space exploration

Manned vs. Unmanned, Mars probes vs. everything else. There was a woman there very stridently arguing that exploration of Pluto was ridiculous given Voyager had recently visited Neptune's moon Triton and one tiny frozen rock on the edge of the solar system was as good as any other, so Mars, Mars, Mars, rah, rah, rah.

[BlueJazz]

5. I think an "F" would be rather harsh. We haven't exactly explored enough objects to assure that...

..our predictions are going to be anywhere accurate.
The fun thing is, Pluto turned out to be a very cool planet in more ways than one.

[gvstn]

14. Planet? ;)

[BlueJazz]

15. I knew that was coming. :)

I'll let it be a planet..in my mind..until we people who looked at it when young, through home-made telescopes, die.

[gvstn]

17. I still think of it as a planet.

But I have to say that it not rotating on a normal orbital plane, sort of convinces me that it might be something other than a planet.

[BlueJazz]

20. Quite true. I remember seeing it when I was a boy through my 12 inch. (in Australia)

Not sure if I could still see it today with the same scope....light pollution and all that.

[gvstn]

22. Gawd, going to Australia is on my very short bucket list.

The sky looks amazing. I'm in the Northeast USA and there is where light pollution really takes hold.

Australia looks beautiful in every picture that I've seen, big bugs and all!

[hunter]

6. Life, not as we know it, that lives in very cold places...

...why not?

There's a lot more cold places in the universe than the narrow range of temperatures our sort of life requires.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

10. The experiment where they produced the building blocks of protein from primordial conditions....

They tried substituting gasses and stimuli and got the same results.

Life is probably abundant in the universe.

I keep hoping a Mars lander finds a fossil of a something that looks like a snail shell.

I can picture all the right wing preachers squeezing their eyes shut and speaking in tongues now.

[paleotn]

7. Gravitational interaction sometime in Pluto's past....

...before it settled into its nice, stable mean-motion resonance with Neptune . Or remnants of its collision with some other object that might have created its moons. Who knows?

[MisterP]

11. given life's track record, they may as well be making it increasingly less habitable for themselves

[mhatrw]

12. Only one species on earth has ever done that, as far as we know.

And it is not microbial.

[MisterP]

13. hey, found another

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_catastrophe

but the big shift in thinking about the Outer System already happened with Voyager, when they found cryovolcanism at Uranus when they expected dead cratered moonlets; OTOH a Neptune resonance may be too weak to give Pluto that much warmth: off to the spectrographs!

[mhatrw]

16. LOL. We can thank the oxygen "catastrophe" for all multicellular life.

And that name was coined before we understood horizontal gene transfer. Once one microbe evolves to metabolize in an oxygen rich environment, word gets around.

[MisterP]

18. eh, just hide in one of the new cells and provide them with ATP

[mhatrw]

19. From each according to his ability ...

damn commie eukaryotes

[daleo]

21. Alan Stern did a talk at the university that I work for, about ten days ago

Great speaker, fascinating subject, New Horizons.