SOFIA Captures Pluto OccultationPublished on Jul 29, 2015
It is no easy task to capture the shadow of Pluto as it travels across the surface of Earth at more than 53,000 mph—but that is exactly what NASA scientists and flight crew did on the night of June 29, 2015. In a true team effort, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy or SOFIA's infrared telescope successfully observed the dwarf planet as it passed in front of a distant star. This event, known as an "occultation," allowed scientific analysis of Pluto and its atmosphere by flying SOFIA at the right moment to an exact location where Pluto's shadow fell on Earth. This video shows the careful planning and real time adaption of the observatory’s flight path leading up to observation, and highlights the data’s contributions to the New Horizons mission.
SOFIA is a joint project of NASA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The aircraft is based at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center facility in Palmdale, California. NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California is home to the SOFIA Science Center that is managed by NASA in cooperation with the Universities Space Research Association headquartered in Columbia, Maryland, and the German SOFIA Institute at the University of Stuttgart.
For more information on SOFIA visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/sofia
Pluto’s floating mountains, intriguing structures fascinate scientists
Sounds like someone has been reading this forum with this response.
They look like bacteria. They are not!” Stern joked. “In any case, these sublimation pits are essentially ubiquitous across the southern portions of Sputnik Planum. … Some of the sublimation pits have merged, and it appears that the material beneath the ice is very dark.”
One working hypothesis, he said, is that everywhere on Pluto the “actual planet” is very dark and all of the regions that are bright are due to ices deposited on the surface by atmospheric transport.
“It appears this is confirming that, because we can see through the volatiles down to what appears to be the dark heart of Pluto.”
http://spaceflightnow.com/2016/01/05/floating-mountains-intriguing-structures-fascinate-scientists/
More likely our forum poster adopted that particular idea when they found it elsewhere, on some more conspiracy-minded site. ---Or else our friend has moved on to posting on the NH twitter feed after finding a somewhat hostile reception here?
The current issue of Sky & Telescope has a cover article on Pluto's moons. Earlier issues focused on Pluto and on its atmosphere and magnetosphere.
The Final Images We Will Ever See of Pluto and Arrokoth
The Final Images We Will Ever See of Pluto and Arrokoth from the New Horizon spacecraft.
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Fixed that for you. Seems unlikely that we will not have another spacecraft visiting Pluto eventually. Maybe not for Arrokoth.
