LONDON: The MIT community is invited to join Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) Professor Richard P. Binzel, a science team co-principal investigator for the NASA New Horizons mission to the Kuiper Belt, for an engaging review of what the encounter data have revealed so far. Binzel will speak in Room 10-250 on Wednesday, Sept. 9 from 4 to 5 p.m.
After nearly two decades of struggling for approval, the New Horizons mission finally reached the launch pad in January 2006. Nine-and-a-half years later, this past July, the piano-sized spacecraft reached the Pluto system, revealing an amazingly bizarre planetary world. Ice Mountains as tall as the Rockies and smooth plains of frozen carbon monoxide 500 km across are just some of the surprising features seen. According to Binzel, Pluto appears to be a globally changing planet with seasonal cycles ranging from decades to millennia producing an evolving landscape of nitrogen ice glaciers and variable atmospheric pressure.
Pluto and its largest satellite, Charon, form a “double planet” system orbiting a common center of gravity located outside of either body. Charon’s surface also appears relatively young and crater-free, implying some recent era geologic activity. Completing the system are four small moons found to be irregularly shaped with complex spin patterns in their own regularly spaced orbits. As New Horizons continues its voyage out of the solar system, a close encounter with at least one newly discovered Kuiper Belt object appears possible within the next four years.
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