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New Horizons: Possible Clouds on Pluto, Next Target is Reddish
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
October 18, 2016

[Image]
Scientists from NASA's New Horizons mission have spotted signs of long
run-out landslides on Pluto's largest moon, Charon. This perspective view
of a chasm on Charon uses stereo reconstruction of images taken by two
cameras on New Horizons, supplemented by a "shape-from-shading" algorithm. Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest
Research Center

The next target for NASA's New Horizons mission -- which made a historic flight past Pluto in July 2015 -- apparently bears a colorful resemblance
to its famous, main destination.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope data suggests that 2014 MU69, a small Kuiper Belt object (KBO) about a billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond
Pluto, is as red, if not redder, than Pluto. This is the first hint at
the surface properties of the far-flung object that New Horizons will
survey on Jan. 1, 2019.

Mission scientists are discussing this and other Pluto and Kuiper Belt findings this week at the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) and European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) meeting
in Pasadena, California.

"We're excited about the exploration ahead for New Horizons, and also
about what we are still discovering from Pluto flyby data," said Alan
Stern, principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "Now, with our spacecraft transmitting the last of its data
from last summer's flight through the Pluto system, we know that the next great exploration of Pluto will require another mission to be sent there."

Stern said that Pluto's complex, layered atmosphere is hazy and appears
to be mostly free of clouds, but the team has spied a handful of potential clouds in images taken with New Horizons' cameras. "If there are clouds,
it would mean the weather on Pluto is even more complex than we imagined," Stern said.

Scientists already knew from telescope observations that Pluto's icy surface below that atmosphere varied widely in brightness. Data from the flyby
not only confirms that, it also shows the brightest areas (such as sections
of Pluto's large heart-shaped region) are among the most reflective in
the solar system. "That brightness indicates surface activity," said Bonnie Buratti, a science team co-investigator from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. "Because we see a pattern of high surface reflectivity equating to activity, we can infer that the dwarf planet Eris, which is known to
be highly reflective, is also likely to be active."

While Pluto shows many kinds of activity, one surface process apparently missing is landslides. Surprisingly, though, they have been spotted on
Pluto's largest moon, Charon, itself some 750 miles (1,200 kilometers)
across. "We've seen similar landslides on other rocky and icy planets,
such as Mars and Saturn's moon Iapetus, but these are the first landslides we've seen this far from the sun, in the Kuiper Belt," said Ross Beyer,
a science team researcher from Sagan Center at the SETI Institute and
NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California. "The big question
is will they be detected elsewhere in the Kuiper Belt?"

Both Hubble and cameras on the New Horizons spacecraft have been aimed
at KBOs over the past two years, with New Horizons taking advantage of
its unique vantage point in the Kuiper Belt to observe nearly a dozen
small worlds in this barely explored region. MU69 is actually the smallest
KBO to have its color measured -- and scientists have used that data to confirm the object is part of the so-called cold classical region of the Kuiper Belt, which is believed to contain some of the oldest, most prehistoric material in the solar system.

"The reddish color tells us the type of Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 is,"
said Amanda Zangari, a New Horizons post-doctoral researcher from Southwest Research Institute. "The data confirms that on New Year's Day 2019, New Horizons will be looking at one of the ancient building blocks of the planets."

The New Horizons spacecraft is currently 3.4 billion miles (5.5 billion kilometers) from Earth and about 340 million miles (540 million kilometers) beyond Pluto, speeding away from the sun at about nine miles (14 kilometers) every second. About 99 percent of the data New Horizons gathered and stored
on its digital recorders during the Pluto encounter has now been transmitted back to Earth, with that transmission set to be completed Oct. 23. New Horizons has covered about one-third of the distance from Pluto to its
next flyby target, which is now about 600 million miles (nearly 1 billion kilometers) ahead.

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, designed, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft, and manages
the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. In addition to being
the home of the mission principal investigator, SwRI, based in San Antonio, leads the science team, payload operations and science planning. New Horizons is the first mission in NASA's New Frontiers Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

For more on the New Horizons mission, visit:

www.nasa.gov/newhorizons

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu

News Media Contact
Guy Webster
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-6278
guy.webster@jpl.nasa.gov

Mike Buckley
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md.
240-228-7536
michael.buckley@jhuapl.edu

Maria Stothoff
Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio
210-522-3305
maria.stothoff@swri.org

Dwayne Brown / Laurie Cantillo
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1726 / 202-358-1077
dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov / laura.l.cantillo@nasa.gov

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