Pluto Colder Than It Should Be, SMA discovery Options

[SigurRosFan]

http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/press/pr0601.html - A Planet Colder Than It Should Be

--- Now, for the first time, Smithsonian astronomers using the Submillimeter Array (SMA) on Mauna Kea in Hawaii have taken direct measurements of thermal heat from both worlds and found that Pluto is indeed colder than expected, colder even than Charon.

It found that the temperature of the ice-covered surface of Pluto was about 43 K instead of the expected 53 K, as on nearby Charon. ---

[Alan Stern]

http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/press/pr0601.html - A Planet Colder Than It Should Be

--- Now, for the first time, Smithsonian astronomers using the Submillimeter Array (SMA) on Mauna Kea in Hawaii have taken direct measurements of thermal heat from both worlds and found that Pluto is indeed colder than expected, colder even than Charon.

It found that the temperature of the ice-covered surface of Pluto was about 43 K instead of the expected 53 K, as on nearby Charon. ---

Sorry sports fans, but this is almost all hype. The same result was published in the
mid-1990s by three separate teams (Jewitt 1994 in AJ; Stern et al. 1993
in Science, and Tryka et al. 1993, in Icarus as I recall), each using different
instruments. The cooling is due to latent heat sinks owing to N2 sublimation.
which of course doesn't apply on Charon. ISO followed up on this in the late
1990s and confirmed it in a powerful way (Lellouch et al. ~2000).
The only thing new here is that Charon has been removed from the modeling
by SMA. Nice, but no headliner. Charon contributes only about 25% of the signal.

-Alan

[Comga]

Sorry sports fans, but this is almost all hype. The same result was published in the
mid-1990s by three separate teams (Jewitt 1994 in AJ; Stern et al. 1993
in Science, and Tryka et al. 1993, in Icarus as I recall)...

Pluto's temperature of ~40K is just one of the many Pluto facts that has been in the New Horizons Press Kit and several other presentations on the New Horizons web site. As he says, old news. A nice demonstration for the SMA, but not news.

[Edited]

That said, being as this is newer data, does this say anything about the thermal kinetics of Pluto? Does it help in deteriming the state of the atmosphere or predicting the future state? As the colder temperature is caused by sublimation, is the temperature a lagging indicator of the atmosphere?

[djellison]

Sounds like Harvard PAO went on an ESA 'claim something we already know' press release writing course.

Doug

[ugordan]

Sounds like Harvard PAO went on an ESA 'claim something we already know'  press release writing course.

I look at it another way. Perhaps press releases like that are more common out there than you think and ESA is just one case of them. You simply decided to bash ESA more than anyone else

[djellison]

Perhaps press releases like that are more common out there than you think

Not really - NASA press releases can be a bit 'hollywood' - but they dont tend to lay claim to something that's already been investigated.

Doug

[ugordan]

Nobody's talking about NASA. There are other institutions in the world that also do press releases. While it's nice NASA press releases tend to be pretty good/accurate, they may very well be an oddball in the whole PR business. As someone already said, you can't really set NASA as a reference point.
It'd be nice, but we're just not there yet. That's not to say ESA should be excused for their admittedly sloppy PR work. The fact is we may have been spoiled by NASAs PR work and have come to expect the same from everyone else.

Anyway, it's probably a bad idea to go down this road (yet) again...