S Alan Stern | Search NASA

NASA NTRS2021

The Dark Side of Pluto

During its departure from Pluto, New Horizons used its LORRI camera to image a portion of Pluto's southern hemisphere that was in a decades-long seasonal winter darkness, but still very faintly illuminated by sunlight reflected by Charon. Recovery of this faint signal was technically challenging. The bright ring of sunlight forward-scattered by haze in the Plutonian atmosphere encircling the nightside hemisphere was severely overexposed, defeating the standard smeared-charge removal required for LORRI images. Reconstruction of the overexposed portions of the raw images, however, allowed adequate corrections to be accomplished. The small solar elongation of Pluto during the departure phase also generated a complex scattered-sunlight background in the images that was three orders of magnitude stronger than the estimated Charon-light flux (the Charon-light flux is similar to the flux of moonlight on Earth a few days before first quarter). A model background image was constructed for each Pluto image based on principal component analysis applied to an ensemble of scattered-sunlight images taken at identical Sun−spacecraft geometry to the Pluto images. The recovered Charon-light image revealed a high-albedo region in the southern hemisphere. We argue that this may be a regional deposit of N2 or CH4 ice. The Charon-light image also shows that the south polar region currently has markedly lower albedo than the north polar region of Pluto, which may reflect the sublimation of N2 ice or the deposition of haze particulates during the recent southern summer.

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NASA NTRS2021

Cryovolcanic flooding in Viking Terra on Pluto

A prominent fossa trough (Uncama Fossa) and adjacent 28-km diameter impact crater (Hardie) in Pluto's Viking Terra, as seen in the high-resolution images from the New Horizons spacecraft, show morphological evidence of in-filling with a material of uniform texture and red-brown color. A linear fissure parallel to the trough may be the source of a fountaining event yielding a cryoclastic deposit having the same composition and color properties as is found in the trough and crater. Spectral maps of this region with the New Horizons LEISA instrument reveal the spectral signature of H2O ice in these structures and in distributed patches in the adjacent terrain in Viking Terra. A detailed statistical analysis of the spectral maps shows that the colored H2O ice filling material also carries the 2.2-μm signature of an ammoniated component that may be an ammonia hydrate (NH3·nH2O) or an ammoniated salt. This paper advances the view that the crater and fossa trough have been flooded by a cryolava debouched from Pluto's interior along fault lines in the trough and in the floor of the impact crater. The now frozen cryolava consisted of liquid H2O infused with the red-brown pigment presumed to be a tholin, and one or more ammoniated compounds. Although the abundances of the pigment and ammoniated compounds entrained in, or possibly covering, the H2O ice are unknown, the strong spectral bands of the H2O ice are clearly visible. In consideration of the factors in Pluto's space environment that are known to destroy ammonia and ammonia-water mixtures, the age of the exposure is of order ≤109 years. Ammoniated salts may be more robust, and laboratory investigations of these compounds are needed.

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