New Wearable Technology: Methane and mysterious dark spots on Pluto – Focus.it

Saturday, July 4, 2015

Methane and mysterious dark spots on Pluto – Focus.it – Focus

The probe New Horizons is now close to the historic meeting with Pluto and its system of 5 satellites known so far. The fly-by will take place on July 14 at a speed of nearly 50,000 km / h.

In the meantime, however, the probe, which June 28 has made the last maneuver before the flyby (about 12,500 km from its surface), he has confirmed thanks to the observations made by its infrared spectrometer, which on the surface of Pluto is methane solid . The existence of this compound had already been observed from Earth in 1976 and is yet another confirmation that the instruments of the probe are working perfectly.

ICE CNG. “That there was methane on Pluto already knew that, but it’s our first survey,” says Will Grundy of Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff (Arizona), the same as in 1930 when Pluto was discovered. “Before long we will be able to tell if there are differences in the concentrations of methane between the various regions of Pluto.”

Methane is a gas is present in the subsurface is the Earth’s atmosphere, and can be of geological origin or biological. Pluto, it is very likely that it is a residual primordial dating dawn of the solar system about 4.5 billion years ago.

Not only methane. In addition to methane, it is likely that the surface of Pluto is also composed of ice of nitrogen, ethane, carbon monoxide and water, possibly covered with a thin layer of powders.

Color images of Pluto taken 25 and 27 last June by the instrument LORRI. On the surface of the dwarf planet of the mysterious dark spots are visible. | NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute

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Images enigmatic for now. But the confirmation of the presence of methane is not the only data acquired from the probe. The instrument LORRI ( Long Range Reconnaissance Imager ) on board the spacecraft has also continued to take pictures of Pluto and its satellites. Images taken on 25 and 27 June this year show the two faces of Pluto: the “ encounter hemisphere “, that is, the hemisphere that will occur in New Horizons during the ‘close encounter, and the opposite hemisphere, which will disappear over the horizon about three days before the American probe reaches the dwarf planet.

Mysterious dark spots. The images show a series of curious dark patches on the hemisphere opposite. Each of the patches has dimensions slightly less than 500 km and the distance separating from each other seems to be the same for all. The strange dark areas are located at the bottom in the image, but actually lie almost perfectly along the equator: the axis of rotation of Pluto fact is heavily tilted (123 °), then the hemisphere that we see corresponds largely to the polar regions.

The spots remind some dark areas, always located in equatorial regions, mapped decades ago by Voyager 2 on the surface of Triton, the largest satellite of Neptune and considered an object very similar to Pluto. What are these dark spots we hope to be able to know in less than two weeks.

The images were processed manually in order to make them as similar as possible to what the human eye would see.

Here is a short video showing the progressive grow of the Pluto-Charon system with decreasing distance (the images used were taken from a distance of 56 million km to 22 million km). You can see that Pluto appears quite bright with the Northern Hemisphere, while the equator seems to be crossed by a dark band discontinuous. Dark also appears a polar region of the moon Charon.