Pluto Predictions, What will NH find? Options

[Juramike]

Dunes.

And basins.

Maybe not as thoroughly chemically processed as Titan's basins, but basins.



What do you think New Horizons will find at Pluto? How will Pluto surprise us?

-Mike

[Decepticon]

For what it's worth...

I expect Pluto to be Triton like mixed with a dash of Ganymede.

And Charon similar to Ariel.





PS I expect something totally unexpected as usually. The 2 newer moons I believe with be very interesting.

[Rob Pinnegar]

PS I expect something totally unexpected as usually. The 2 newer moons I believe with be very interesting.

I'll be really interested to see the details of how Nix and Hydra's orbits work. They should deviate pretty noticeably from ellipses because of the mutual motion of Pluto and Charon.

I understand that some work has already done in this direction (i.e. predicting the orbital paths); it'll be neat to see whether the predictions are accurate. One would think they would be, but we could always get a surprise.

As for Pluto and Charon -- really, we can forget about predicting anything for our first close-up look at a KBO, apart from Triton which is really in a class by itself. If we're spectacularly lucky, we might be able to see some lingering evidence of the impact that created Charon (apart from Nix and Hydra's existence). I think that would be asking a bit much, but you never know.