Nov 9 2015

From The Space Library

Release 15-214 Four Months after Pluto Flyby, NASA’s New Horizons Yields Wealth of Discovery

From possible ice volcanoes to twirling moons, NASA’s New Horizons science team is discussing more than 50 exciting discoveries about Pluto at this week’s 47th Annual Meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences in National Harbor, Maryland.

“The New Horizons mission has taken what we thought we knew about Pluto and turned it upside down,” said Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “It's why we explore -- to satisfy our innate curiosity and answer deeper questions about how we got here and what lies beyond the next horizon."

For one such discovery, New Horizons geologists combined images of Pluto’s surface to make 3-D maps that indicate two of Pluto’s most distinctive mountains could be cryovolcanoes -- ice volcanoes that may have been active in the recent geological past.

“It’s hard to imagine how rapidly our view of Pluto and its moons are evolving as new data stream in each week. As the discoveries pour in from those data, Pluto is becoming a star of the solar system,” said mission Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “Moreover, I’d wager that for most planetary scientists, any one or two of our latest major findings on one world would be considered astounding. To have them all is simply incredible.”

The two cryovolcano candidates are large features measuring tens of miles or kilometers across and several miles or kilometers high.

“These are big mountains with a large hole in their summit, and on Earth that generally means one thing -- a volcano,” said Oliver White, New Horizons postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. “If they are volcanic, then the summit depression would likely have formed via collapse as material is erupted from underneath. The strange hummocky texture of the mountain flanks may represent volcanic flows of some sort that have traveled down from the summit region and onto the plains beyond, but why they are hummocky, and what they are made of, we don't yet know.”

While their appearance is similar to volcanoes on Earth that spew molten rock, ice volcanoes on Pluto are expected to emit a somewhat melted slurry of substances such as water ice, nitrogen, ammonia, or methane. If Pluto proves to have volcanoes, it will provide an important new clue to its geologic and atmospheric evolution.

“After all, nothing like this has been seen in the deep outer solar system,” said Jeffrey Moore, New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team leader, at Ames.

Pluto’s Long History of Geologic Activity

Pluto’s surface varies in age -- from ancient, to intermediate, to relatively young --according to another new finding from New Horizons.

To determine the age of a surface area of the planet, scientists count crater impacts. The more crater impacts, the older the region likely is. Crater counts of surface areas on Pluto indicate that it has surface regions dating to just after the formation of the planets of our solar system, about four billion years ago.

But there also is a vast area that was, in geological terms, born yesterday -- meaning it may have formed within the past 10 million years. This area, informally named Sputnik Planum, appears on the left side of Pluto’s “heart” and is completely crater-free in all images received, so far.

New data from crater counts reveal the presence of intermediate, or “middle-aged,” terrains on Pluto, as well. This suggests Sputnik Planum is not an anomaly -- that Pluto has been geologically active throughout much of its more than 4-billion-year history.

“We’ve mapped more than a thousand craters on Pluto, which vary greatly in size and appearance,” said postdoctoral researcher Kelsi Singer, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. “Among other things, I expect cratering studies like these to give us important new insights into how this part of the solar system formed.”

Building Blocks of the Solar System

Crater counts are giving the New Horizons team insight into the structure of the Kuiper Belt itself. The dearth of smaller craters across Pluto and its large moon Charon indicate the Kuiper Belt, which is an unexplored outer region of our solar system, likely had fewer smaller objects than some models had predicted.

This leads New Horizons scientists to doubt a longstanding model that all Kuiper Belt objects formed by accumulating much smaller objects --less than a mile wide. The absence of small craters on Pluto and Charon support other models theorizing that Kuiper Belt objects tens of miles across may have formed directly, at their current -- or close to current -- size.

In fact, the evidence that many Kuiper Belt objects could have been “born large” has scientists excited that New Horizons’ next potential target -- the 30-mile-wide (40-50 kilometer wide) KBO named 2014 MU69 -- which may offer the first detailed look at just such a pristine, ancient building block of the solar system.

Pluto’s Spinning, Merged Moons

The New Horizons mission also is shedding new light on Pluto’s fascinating system of moons, and their unusual properties. For example, nearly every other moon in the solar system -- including Earth’s moon -- is in synchronous rotation, keeping one face toward the planet. This is not the case for Pluto’s small moons.

Pluto’s small lunar satellites are spinning much faster, with Hydra -- its most distant moon -- rotating an unprecedented 89 times during a single lap around the planet. Scientists believe these spin rates may be variable because Charon exerts a strong torque that prevents each small moon from settling down into synchronous rotation.

Another oddity of Pluto’s moons: scientists expected the satellites would wobble, but not to such a degree. Most inner moons in the solar system keep one face pointed toward their central planet; this animation shows that certainly isn’t the case with the small moons of Pluto, which behave like spinning tops. Pluto is shown at center with, in order from closest to farthest orbit, its moons Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/M. Showalter

“Pluto’s moons behave like spinning tops,” said co-investigator Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.

“We suspect from this that Pluto had more moons in the past, in the aftermath of the big impact that also created Charon,” said Showalter.

SOFIA Cycle 4 Science Program Selections Announced

The Science Center of the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA, announces the selection of 101 astrophysics research programs for science flights during the observatory’s fourth annual cycle of operations. These investigations will be conducted from February 2016 through January 2017, including a deployment to the Southern Hemisphere in mid-2016.

A list of the selected SOFIA Cycle 4 programs is available on the results page.

These programs include investigation of the history of water on Mars, a search for remnant signs of planet formation around nearby stars, and a comprehensive study of star formation processes across an entire galaxy.

“The Cycle 4 investigations have the potential to make substantial contributions to a remarkably broad range of astronomy research areas,” said SOFIA Science Mission Operations (SMO) Director Erick Young of the Universities Space Research Association (USRA).

“We will employ six of SOFIA’s scientific instruments, two of which have capabilities new to SOFIA, to make these observations,” elaborated SMO Deputy Director Hans Zinnecker of the German SOFIA Institute (DSI). The selected projects will showcase SOFIA’s unique assets and capabilities.”

U.S. and German review panels comprised of experts drawn from the scientific community evaluated the scientific merits of submitted proposals. NASA awarded a total of 478 hours of SOFIA guest observer time and NASA’s partner the German Aerospace Center (DLR) awarded 80 hours, to be carried out during 106 science flights planned for the next year. Other observing hours during those flights will be allocated for other purposes such as calibration measurements and scientific programs of SOFIA’s instrument teams.

SOFIA is a substantially modified Boeing 747SP aircraft that carries a telescope with an effective diameter of 100 inches (2.5 meters) at altitudes up to 45,000 feet (14 km), above the obscuring layer of water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere.

The SOFIA program is a partnership of NASA and DLR. NASA's Ames Research Center located in Moffett Field, California manages the SOFIA science mission in cooperation with USRA, located in Columbia, Maryland, and DSI, located in Stuttgart, Germany. The SOFIA aircraft is based at the NASA Armstrong research aircraft operations facility in Palmdale, California.

Release M15-162 NASA Holds Media Briefing on Carbon’s Role in Earth’s Future Climate NASA will host a media teleconference at noon EST on Thursday, Nov. 12 to discuss the latest insights into how Earth is responding to rising levels of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, and what this means for our future climate.

Later this month, a United Nations climate meeting in Paris will focus on setting limits on future levels of human-produced carbon emissions. This NASA briefing will present new observations from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) mission, NASA’s first satellite dedicated to measuring carbon dioxide, and preview field work planned in the North Atlantic and Alaska.

The panelists will be:

• Michael Freilich, director of NASA’s Earth Science Division at the agency’s headquarters in Washington
• Mike Behrenfeld, principal investigator for NASA’s NAAMES field campaign, Oregon State University in Corvallis
• George Hurtt, lead for NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System, University of Maryland in College Park
• Annmarie Eldering, deputy project scientist for NASA’s OCO-2 mission at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California
• Lesley Ott, research scientist in the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland

To participate, media must email their name and affiliation to Steve Cole at stephen.e.cole@nasa.gov by 11 a.m. on Thursday. Media and the public also may ask questions during the briefing on Twitter using the hashtag #askNASA.

Earth’s land and ocean currently absorb about half of all carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, but it’s uncertain whether the planet can keep this up in the future. NASA’s Earth science program works to improve our understanding of how carbon absorption and emission processes work in nature and how they could change in a warming world with increasing levels of carbon dioxide and methane emissions from human activities.

Release M15-161 NASA Offers Media Access to Cygnus Cargo Module Nov. 13

Media will have the opportunity to view the Orbital ATK Cygnus spacecraft filled with cargo and research for the International Space Station on Friday, Nov.13, at NASA’s Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility (PHSF) at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Photos will be permitted, and representatives from Orbital ATK, United Launch Alliance, and the International Space Station office at Kennedy will be available for interviews at the facility. Media will depart from Kennedy’s Press Site at 1 p.m. EST, returning by 4:30 p.m.

The unpiloted Cygnus will be Orbital ATK’s fourth cargo mission to the space station for NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services contract, and the first flight of the enhanced variant of the Cygnus pressurized cargo module, which will deliver more than 7,000 pounds to the station. Cygnus consists of a pressurized cargo module for crew supplies, scientific experiments and equipment, together with an associated service module providing solar power and propulsion.

The launch is currently targeted for Thursday, Dec. 3 during a 30-minute window that opens at approximately 6 p.m., aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 401 rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida.

Full clean room attire will be provided and must be worn during the PHSF tour. Long pants and closed-toe shoes are required. No shorts, skirts or high heels will be permitted. To be consistent with clean room protocol, journalists are asked not to wear perfume, cologne or makeup.

NASA security will verify the integrity of camera equipment and associated items to be taken inside the facility. Prior to entering the high bay, photographers must clean camera equipment under the supervision of contamination control specialists. Alcohol wipes will be provided.

All camera equipment must be self-contained. No portable lights can be permitted. Flash photography will be allowed, but the facility has adequate high pressure sodium lighting (orange cast) for pictures. Wireless microphones will be permitted inside the high bay.

Nonessential equipment such as camera bags or other carrying cases, cellular phones, pencils, food, tobacco, chewing gum, lighters, matches or pocket knives are prohibited inside the clean room.