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---------------------1893 - Our visit to the Dwarf Planet, Pluto.
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- New Horizon spacecraft took 9 years , 5 months, and 25 days to reach its fly-by. The journey started with a sling shot using the speed of Earth’s orbit to boost its speed to 99,419 miles per hour heading out of the Solar System.
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- The Sun’s gravity continued to slow the speed down. When New Horizon reached Pluto it was still traveling 30,000 miles per hour. Pluto is 4,670,000,000 miles away and even with the speed of light, the radio transmissions take 4.6 hours to traverse the distance.
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- That was a long way to go for a short fly-by but there was no fuel left to slow the craft down. Even with this short visit what we found was a surprise. This distant object proved to be more complex and dynamic that anyone expected. It is not a frozen dead rock. Not just a big asteroid at the edge of the Solar System.
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- New Horizon flew to within 476,000 miles of Pluto’s surface. The heart-shaped plain that stood out so prominently was actually a nitrogen glacier. The largest known glacier in the Solar System.
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- On Earth we have a water-ice volatility cycle. The ice, water, vapor cycle rotates with the seasons. On Pluto there are four volatile ices going through the freezing and precipitation cycles. The four volatiles are methane, nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and yes, water.
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- These cycles are created by Pluto’s eccentric, elliptical orbit around the Sun. At its closes it is 2,700,000,000 miles from the Sun. At its farthest it is 4,500,000,000 miles from the Sun. ( Earth averages 93,000,000 miles in its orbit). It takes Pluto 248 years to circle the Sun.
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- Frozen hard water-ice was found widespread across Pluto’s surface acting as a crustal bedrock. The surface even shows sheets of ice that have flowed in the past and maybe even are currently flowing. There are plains that have surfaces that are less than 10 million years old. The is due to thermal convection of Pluto’s deep ices.
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- Pluto has volcanoes with broad bases, gentle slopes, and summit depressions. Some volcanoes rise 3.5 miles elevation. Called cyro-volcanoes because they erupt a slurry of melted ices instead of molten rock.
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- Pluto’s surface has more than 1,000 craters greater than 10 miles across formed by impacting Kuiper Belt objects ( comets and asteroids).
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- Pluto has a blue haze atmosphere extending 125 miles above the surface. This atmosphere is believed to be due to chemical reactions of ultraviolet sunlight interacting with nitrogen and methane. The chemical reactions create soot-like particles forming a foggy haze.
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- Today, one year later, New Horizon is 300,000,000 miles beyond Pluto heading towards Kuiper Belt Object, 2014MU69. This rendezvous is expected to occur January 1, 2019.
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- Pluto was my 9th planet when I was in school. When even larger Kuiper Belt Objects were discovered beyond Pluto’s orbit astronomers decided to call them all “ Dwarf Planets”. But, we may still be missing the real 9th planet that is 10 times the size of the Earth. This is a theory being used to explain how 6 other Kuiper Belt Objects have highly eccentric orbits under the influence of another massive object at the fringes of our Solar System.
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- Could it be a captured exoplanets from an alien world? If we discover this 9th planet it could bring us new knowledge about other solar systems and planet creation. Stay tuned, an announcement will be made shortly.
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- Other Reviews on the subject available upon request:
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- #1857 - to learn about the 5 moons orbiting Pluto
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- #1856 - to learn more about the 9th planet that might take Pluto’s place, if we can discover it. It is the math that tells us something is out there.
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- #1660 - to learn about the other Kuiper Belt Objects.
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- #1632 - to learn about the other Dwarf Planets
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----- 707-536-3272 ---------------- Sunday, July 17, 2016 -----
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