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Pluto and its satellites will be the most distant objects ever reconnoitered when NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft conducts its intensive flyby of this system in 2015. The size-frequency distribution (SFD) of craters on the surfaces in the Pluto system have long been expected to provide a useful measure of the size distribution of Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) down to much smaller size scales than presently...
This paper aims to alleviate the confusion between many different ways of defining latitude and longitude on Pluto, as well as to help prevent future Pluto papers from drawing false conclusion due to problems with coordinates. In its 2009 meeting report, the International Astronomical Union Working Group on Cartographic Coordinates and Rotational Elements redefined Pluto coordinates to follow a right-handed...
Evidence from stellar occultation datasets and Charon’s H2O–ice dominated surface composition has long suggested a lack of any current atmosphere around this satellite planet. However, impacts from both Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud comets must from time to time import N2, CH4, and other cometary super-volatiles that can create temporary atmospheres around Charon. Here we estimate the frequency of such...
We compare Mid-Ultraviolet (MUV) spectra of Pluto taken over a period of 20years by the International Ultraviolet Explorer, the HST-Faint Object Spectrograph, and the HST-Cosmic Origins Spectrograph. We extract Pluto-only spectra from the IUE data and associate them with corrected longitudes when necessary. Comparing them with HST spectra provides further evidence of temporal changes in Pluto’s geometric...
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