Getting to know Pluto

[HuckleB]

After last summer’s Pluto flyby, the New Horizons spacecraft started sending data to Earth – at 2 kilobits per second. What scientists have learned so far from that rich, slow cache.
https://earthsky.org/space/getting-to-know-pluto

"When the New Horizons spacecraft made its flyby of Pluto on July 14, 2015, there was worldwide celebration that we’d finally gotten our first detailed look at this completely new type of planet in the outer reaches of our solar system.

But for those of us on the New Horizons science team, that day and those first images were only the beginning. Since then, I’ve been watching with amazement as the New Horizons spacecraft has transmitted spectacular images back that reveal surprises all over the place. We’ve been making discovery after discovery about the dwarf ice planet Pluto and its moon Charon, and this is likely to continue as we get more data back from the spacecraft. Here’s a summary of just a few of our scientific results to date.

...

As an atmospheric scientist, I found the most amazing discovery to be the brilliant, light blue, globally extensive haze that we can see because large numbers of small atmospheric particles scatter sunlight. This haze extends hundreds of kilometers into space, and embedded within it are over 20 very thin, but far brighter, layers. We suspect the thin layers are produced by some type of atmospheric wave that causes localized regions of condensation of some as-yet-unknown gas. The largest moon of Saturn, Titan, shows similar layering of haze in its upper atmosphere. So there may be some interesting comparative planetary studies that come out of the analysis of the Pluto data.

...

These are just a few of the many exciting, and unexpected, results from the New Horizons flyby of Pluto and Charon. The discoveries we’ve already made will mean that textbooks on planetary science must be rewritten. And yet this sampling of the New Horizons results is just from the tip of an ice mountain of data that we’ll be analyzing and writing papers about for many years, perhaps decades. The data are so rich in things we’ve never seen before that I’m sure there are many more surprises yet to come."

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A fun, all-too brief overview!

[Wilms]

1. And there's still a lot of data on the way.

A great mission.

[Rhiannon12866]

2. K&R! Fascinating discoveries!

Thanks for posting!

[HuckleB]

3. You're welcome! And thanks.

[Rhiannon12866]

4. Explorations like this are fascinating, especially Pluto, considering the unimaginable distance

I grew up watching the space program, Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, and remember watching the first moon landing as a kid at summer camp, and now the Mars rovers and Scott Kelly at the ISS. Think these are so worthwhile since we learn so much, looking forward to learning more from our own solar system and farther...