Mar. 21, 2016

New Horizons Team Presents Latest Pluto Science Results at Planetary Conference

Members of NASA’s New Horizons mission team will present nearly 40 scientific reports on the Pluto system this week during the 47th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference near Houston. The scientists will discuss results included in the March 18 issue of the journal Science, as well as results gathered from analyses of new data since the Science papers were submitted.
“The New Horizons team has been inundated with high-quality data beaming back from our spacecraft, now out in the Kuiper Belt beyond Pluto,” says New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “The findings we report this week at LPSC cover every aspect of the Pluto system, from its surface and atmosphere, to its origin and the nature and origin of its satellites. We’re excited to share these many results.”

The New Horizons team will discuss several noteworthy results with media on Monday, March 21, at noon CDT/1 p.m. EDT. The briefing will be webcast live at http://livestream.com/viewnow/LPSC2016. Presenters and topics include:
• Cathy Olkin, deputy project scientist from Southwest Research Institute, describing how New Horizons measured the radar reflectivity of Pluto and shattered the record for most-distant object ever explored by radar. “It’s a record that should stand for decades or longer – unless, of course, we use that technique again when New Horizons encounters another Kuiper Belt object,” Olkin says.
• Richard Binzel, co-investigator from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reporting on a new understanding of Pluto’s long-term climate variations that include the finding that Pluto has both tropics and arctic regions. “Right now, Pluto is between two extreme climate states,” Binzel says. “We are just beginning to understand the long-term climate of Pluto.”

• Principal Investigator Stern reporting on evidence that Pluto’s long-term polar axis shifts drive sharp changes in the planet’s atmospheric pressure over time, possibly causing Pluto’s atmosphere to be much more massive than that of even Mars. “In fact,” Stern says, “this opens up the possibility that liquid nitrogen may have once or even many times flowed on Pluto’s surface.”
• Orkan Umurhan, postdoctoral researcher from NASA Ames Research Center, discussing the discovery and extensive variety of glacial landforms, glacial flow, and glacial erosion across Pluto. “There are two likely scenarios for the erosion we see,” Umurhan says. “It could be gradual, when much of Pluto’s nitrogen ice was lost over time. Or, it could be part of a cycle in which the nitrogen ice evaporates and redeposits on the highlands, before flowing back into the plains. In all likelihood, both scenarios have been and still are operating.”

• Kelsi Singer, postdoctoral researcher from Southwest Research Institute, reporting on the first age-dating of Pluto’s satellite system from crater counts, showing for the first time that the giant impact believed to have created all of Pluto’s known satellites cannot be recent and instead occurred some 4 billion years in the distant past. “This is our first proof that the giant impact that created the Pluto system must have been ancient, not recent,” Singer says. “That puts the impact on a timeline going back billions of years, rather than millions.”

Stern will also deliver a lecture, “The Exploration of Pluto,” on Tuesday, March 22, at 7:30 p.m. CDT. The lecture is free and open to the public, and will be archived online. For the full schedule of live and archived Web events, see http://livestream.com/viewnow/LPSC2016.