Is it thinner and denser, or is there just less of it overall?

-kap

"Eyes on Pluto" show NH targeting Earth ... It is now 10 minutes to the scheduled PHONE HOME signal .

Fernando

Still not known whether the heart is elevation or depression.

https://twitter.com/CosmicThespian/status/621041641764335616

NASA TV schedule change:

8:30 p.m., Tuesday, July 14 (0030 GMT/15 Jul) - New Horizons Phones Home - Mission Update (all channels)
9:30 p.m., Tuesday, July 14 (0130 GMT/15 Jul) - NASA News Briefing on New Horizon Mission (all channels)

Will that be the one telling us if all of the imaging activities went off as planned? - Maybe even give us an idea of how many megabytes were produced?

Whoa. Nice. It's an image in... spectral signatures.

Wonderfully varied landscapes.

--Bill

Eyes On Pluto is real time, so that means the signal will reach Earth 4.5 hrs or so later.

I don't post much - but I read avidly, and I'd like to thank all the UMSF regular posters.
I'll be glued to this thread, and NASA TV, after 8:30 tonight.

Mainly, I'm boggled at what a rich time this is for solar system exploration - we've got

Voyager probes exiting (and exiting and exiting) the solar system
A probe at Pluto
A probe at Saturn (and had a lander on Titan!!!)
Another probe arriving at Jupiter in a year
A probe at Ceres
A double probe on a comet
Two rovers on Mars, and multiple probes in orbit.
(skipping Earth)
Two active solar missions

...and recently
Other Mars missions
Orbiters and a lander on the Moon
A probe at Venus
A probe at Mercury

Its hard to keep up with UMFS these days.

ce

Hmm, why only near the pole? Is some of the atmosphere condensing there during the winter and leaving a dark residue behind when it evaporates as the seasons change, or (wild speculation) is it being channeled there by a magnetic field?

My crude attempt at overlaying the false colour with the LORRI pic.

It's what I understood this morning from Alice Bowman...but not 100% sure. Anyway, this Will not be only aCarrier saying "I'm alive" it'll be like a 20-30 mn com.

My guess would be that the Pluto/Charon gravitational field is such that tholin particles coming from Pluto's atmosphere end up landing at Charon's poles (the south pole being unlit right now) due to a lower gravitational potential barrier there.

Twenty years ago, when mission concepts for Pluto were being proposed, it was regarded as a small, boring lump of ice on the edge of the solar system. It didn't really seem worth doing a multi-billion dollar mission for that, so it was a good thing that Johns Hopkins trimmed the science requirements to the point where it could be done for $600 million. I think it is safe to say that Pluto is turning out to be far more interesting than expected.

The surface color reminds me of the Huygens picture of the surface of Titan, which is probably because it is made of similar stuff. Titan and Pluto both have nitrogen atmospheres with a trace of methane. Pluto adds carbon monoxide to the mix, which opens up additional chemical possibilities. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the red color is probably related to the nitrogen abundance. I can't think of any colored compounds made of just carbon, oxygen and hydrogen, but nitrogen has a number of red and brown compounds. Nitrogen dioxide is reddish-brown. Azo dyes are two six membered carbon rings linked by a pair of nitrogen atoms, and some of them are orange-red. In a molecule it is really the bonds that are involved in light absorption, and bonds involving nitrogen often absorb in the visible range.

There has been some discussion of surface liquids. Liquids requires both adequate temperature and pressure. Surface conditions on Pluto are projected to be 33-55 Kelvin and 1 Pascal of pressure. Looking at a table of triple points, the closest I can come is ethane which requires at least 90 K and 0.8 Pa of pressure. Ethane is two carbon atoms joined together, surrounded by six hydrogens. Liquids close to their boiling points are not very stable or long lived, because they tend to evaporate quickly. Mixtures can have lower boiling points than any of the pure components involved, but I would be very surprised if that made enough of a difference for liquids to be viable under current conditions. If there was any liquid ethane near the surface of Pluto the atmosphere would be very rich in ethane vapor, which it isn't, although ethane has been detected on the surface.

From emily's twiter feed:

Related link (with a map): http://hubblesite.org/explore_astronomy/skywatch/episodes/8

Also: