 March NASA Night Sky Network member webinar, tonight we're hosting the webinar from the offices of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in San Francisco, California. We're excited to present this teleconference with our guest speaker, Dr. Orkan Umarhan from NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, just a little bit to the south of us, who will bring us up to date with the latest findings from the New Horizons missions fly by the Pluto system last summer. It'll be a little bit different and he'll explain this a little bit later. We actually have, he actually has a bunch of images that are currently under embargo and he's not really supposed to show them to anyone until Friday, but so we're getting a sneak peek of what some papers will come out with on Friday. You might notice that there's both a chat window and a question and answer window on your desktop. The chat window is for folks to introduce themselves and for a general chat along with any technical issues you might have during the webinar. The question and answer window is where you should submit questions for our guest speaker and we'll get to those towards the end. It'll keep track of your questions so that we'll know if we've answered them or not and I also need to remember to start recording. If I don't do that. Oh, Dave, did you already start recording? We have a couple of announcements here. Clubs whose members have created and logged at least two events in the first quarter of 2016 qualify to enter a drawing for a 3D printed set of Jovian Moon models created by Gion at ShapeWake.com and so this is a great thing I think that we've got a picture on the website someplace so you can check out what these things look like. It's a great addition for your outreach events if you're going to be looking at Jupiter and Jupiter is going to be pretty good here coming up and you can show visitors a good close-up view of each of the four major moons and discuss some of the features and actually look at these 3D printed models and here's another highlight is that Jupiter is high in the sky perfect for observation and NASA's Juno mission is going to be arriving there later this summer and the May webinar on May 11th planned to join us to hear from Steven Levin the project scientist for the Juno mission and so that's we're excited about that so we have five sets of these to give away so make sure you log your events for January through March the more events your club logs the more entries your club will have in the contest to get these the deadline for logging events to qualify is April 16th 2016 also a reminder clubs that log at least two outreach events each quarter are qualified to receive toolkits if you haven't received a toolkit and while and your club has been logging events may have already received all of our toolkits if so please contact us at night sky info at Astros Society org to request additional toolkit if needed or to see if we have any other materials we can ship here. Also stick around after the talk because we have a book to give away we have the total sky watchers manual and so after the presentation I'll hold one up and so you can see what it looks like you will have a little drawing of sorts a virtual drawing to see who might get one of those. So Dr. Orkin Umar Han is a research scientist and space science at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffitt Field California. Dr. Umar Han's research focuses on evolutionary processes both on planetary surfaces and in protoplanetary disks. He's published on a number of topics including astrophysical flows and turbulence fundamentals of sheer flow instabilities geomorphology and landform evolution and its modeling. He joined the New Horizons Geology and Geophysics Investigation Team in June of 2013. His main role on the mission has been in providing mathematical modeling framework for the various geophysical systems are scenarios of interest and appropriate to the Pluto system. Dr. Umar Han regularly writes blog posts from NASA about New Horizons and he's also a co-author on a graduate level textbook on fluid dynamics for physicists due to come out this spring. Please welcome Orkin to the webinar. Hi. Really pleased to be here. So so I'm going to start I'm going to go straight away and start the start. Here we go. Share screen. Here we go. And I'm presuming that everyone can see this. Oh no. I can see it. Oh you can see it. Ah. Okay. Retreat. Is that what it's. Let me. There we go. I got it. I got it. Okay. Here we go. Okay. All right. Reboot. Good. Okay. So I want to tell you about the recent results we have from the New Horizons geology and geophysics efforts. We have a paper that's coming out on Friday on Science Magazine. So I'm going to give you a little bit of a sneak preview of some of the results that we're going to report on. It's very exciting and and I want to emphasize I speak on behalf of the team and in the sense of everyone is very very very excited by results that we're coming out with and publishing. So let me start off with just a little bit of background here. As some of you well know the Pluto is a member of the Kuiper Belt and the Kuiper Belt system. Some would call it the king of the Kuiper Belt. Some would call it the king of the dwarfs. It all depends on your perspective of course. I wanted to emphasize that in the recent years we've discovered a whole family of very large dwarf planets of which Pluto and the Pluto-Sharon system is one of them. And as you can see in the bottom panel here we have a whole number of other planets dwarf planets that have been discovered and for a sense of size and scale you can see how they relate to one another. A mission to how Mia would be cool because we're going to be going to a giant football out there in the Kuiper Belt but you know this is just a personal opinion of course. Anyways so that's the Kuiper Belt you know it's one of the Kuiper Belt had been postulated to exist long before it was discovered and so it's actually in the last 15 years or so that now this region is beginning to be populated in terms of our knowledge of what's out there and it's very exciting insofar as it is also essentially a relic of the formation stage of the solar system. So the things that we see out there are things that were there when the solar system was formed and in some ways is a relic of that age. So just to kind of put things into context as Pluto was discovered and by Claude Tombow in 1930 and so that was it was a big deal it was it was a it was a hunt to discover an object that was thought to be out there and so it was discovered in 1930 and and some of you I won't go into the history of it but it was has intrigued people ever since to see that there's this planet at this distance out there and what might it be. We have here the best Hubble Space Telescope image of Pluto right prior to the New Horizons flybine and the bottom left here you see essentially a true color map of Pluto itself and it's actually it's a composite image through this magic of over sampling it's called when you take a number of images taken in rapid succession with one another and you can actually kind of lay them on top of each other and make it seem like it's actually of higher resolution but the true resolution of the images that were taken at that point even with Hubble Space Telescope is you you see on the right it's fairly low resolution however we were able to identify from that alone that the Pluto surface has a lot of interesting texture at those days that's what we were kind of referring to it as where the light and dark regions essentially is a testament to its relative albedo on the surface. Now in 1978 Pluto was discovered to have a companion and in that companion we called is called Charon is in a synchronous orbit with Pluto in about six and a half day period and so meaning to say that it's synchronous is that the same face of both planets face each other as they go around in as they do their orbital dance. Now Charon's surface was identified as having a lot of water ice to spectroscopic measurements and as of then and actually as of now as well there is no detected atmosphere on Charon and to put this into context the relative size of Charon to Pluto is about two to one and in other words Pluto's radius is twice that of Charon's which puts its mass at approximately eight times that of Charon so you might want to think of it as you and your two-year-old child if you have a child of course so that kind of relate that that kind of relative mass mass size relationship. Now in the last few years and some of you probably followed this story keenly four small rocky moons were discovered to be orbiting the Pluto Charon system sticks sticks Kerberos, Nixon, Hydra and I will show you at the end of the of this talk some images associated with some of the images we've got of those individual moons as well. So now the origins of these moons and where did they come from and a lot of these things are still kind of in debate but it seems very likely that the origins of the entire system is a relic of a past impact that actually formed Charon itself. I'll get to that in a minute. Real quick the surface composition what I'm showing here in the top bar is a spectroscopic spectrum of the surface of Pluto and you can see here essentially what you should take away from this is that Pluto shows copious amounts of absorption in various volatiles including carbon monoxide nitrogen and methane and we were able to make estimates based on just these observations of the spectrum before we got to Pluto that the nitrogen on the surface dominates the that of all the other volatiles by about 10 to one basically still kind of holds. Now the atmosphere had been actually Pluto actually has an atmosphere and it was discovered to be there about 20 25 years ago in 1985 I guess it's almost 30 years ago now and the surface pressure associated with the atmosphere is about 10 micro bars so that essentially puts that is at one one hundred thousandth the current surface pressure on the earth but if you stay if you pay attention to the press conference that will be held at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference next Monday we have some interesting results talking about how this atmosphere may have actually gone through very strong climactic change over the last million years so that's kind of very exciting stuff to of course I really can't say a whole lot about that right now. So yeah some of the stuff here is still holds the atmosphere is considered to be steadily losing mass over the four billion year lifetime of Pluto itself but exactly how much is being lost is now also under debate based on the results that we've gotten but my my primary interest right now is to kind of talk about the surface and the geomorphology and the various geological features that we've observed on the on Pluto itself and also of Sharon. Here's a cutaway are the theorists who work on this study the interior structure have essentially identified based on the size and the mass what kind of internal structure is likely to be the case inside of Pluto and you can see that actually Pluto is primarily has a primarily a rocky core and surrounding it a very thin you know thin but I mean thin could be up to from 20 to 50 kilometers thick water ocean and then surrounding that a water iced mantle of about 200 kilometers thick and then the very very top layers the crust itself the surface is exposed to light probably unlikely composed of nitrogen carbon monoxide and methane as well and so well actually it turns out to be the case so and before I jump into the awesomeness that is the Pluto system in terms of our new horizons images let me say a few words about the origin of the Pluto Sharon system a lot of people have thought about the problem quite deeply especially soon after it was discovered that Sharon was even there and and it's likely from all the extensive modeling that's been done and scientific debates that have raged over the last 20 years on the matter it seems that the the least offensive hypothesis and you know this is how we do things in science we try to find that a scenario that is the is the least it appears to be the least wrong and we think that that the system was probably born from a collision very much like what we think the earth moon system came about in the same way that the earth moon system has come about that there was a large impact and on Pluto part of Pluto was ripped out and debris was ripped out strong enough to remove it from the surface but not strong enough to leave the the gravitational pull of the of Pluto itself and it eventually re-collapsed and formed it formed a planetary object which is the moon Sharon and it's now while we don't yet have 100 percent certain that this is also the origin of the the small rocky moons we do think that the that seems to be the running hypothesis amongst most of the team members and most of the members on the new horizons team who've I mean obviously who've worked on this and we've thought about it very closely so yeah so that's kind of where things that are at as far as the origins are concerned the launch of new horizons itself was on January 19th 2006 and the the trajectory oh so let me just say a couple very short words about the scientific payload the new horizon spacecraft itself is the size of a grand piano so what you see here the artist depiction of the spacecraft itself is quite small and in fact the antenna dish itself being no larger than probably I would say five five and a half feet across in diameter is too is so small that the volume of data that we have actually acquired on the mission requires about 16 months of download time because the antenna transmits at something like a thousand bowed which is like the old telephone mode in lines which I can't believe I'm saying this but I am old enough to remember suffering with one of those but that's kind of how it is and but we're patient and it gives us a lot of time to digest the information that does come down at the trickle rate so maybe this is actually better time to ingest our information and think about it as the data comes down anyways so the instruments that are there are seven instruments that are on the spacecraft lori is the high resolution imager and many of the images that I'll be talking to you about showing you today are very high resolution images that come from this black and white camera some of our best images come at about 90 to 90 meters per pixel and each frame image frame is about 1024 square pixel frames so you kind of get a sense for how close we must have gotten to the surface there are the other instruments there's the various particle and dust counter instruments that are on board pepsi and the sdc the student dust counter swap is the plasma spectrometer which is a spectrometer that's essentially measuring the amount of ionized particles that are coming surrounding the pluto system itself rex is the radio science observant I mean the radio science dish that's on there so it's making radio measurements of the surface there's the alice instrument which is the uv imaging and spectrometer and then of concern for us in addition to lori is the ralph instrument which is the it's a it's a composite which is made of the mvic and lisa cameras lisa just to give you a sense is that actually it's a 256 cube where actually the 256 gives you the image frame and you have 256 channels for each frame which is used for resolving the spectrum of say a particular uh say snapshot so essentially what we we are getting data cubes which is essentially you can for a given point on the surface resolve the resolution associated with that particular camera we get 256 wavelength bins in the infrared so we can actually extract a very uh a relatively detailed spectrum uh in in the in the infrared range as I said so anyways that gives you kind of the larger sense now the the flight route itself as you can see here took about 10 years to get to the Pluto system and it is now as some of you may know it's on its way out into the Kuiper belt itself so uh we have an object that we have essentially directed the spacecraft to go to the a Kuiper belt object called mu-69 and it will if congress funds the mission there will be other people there will be people on the other side on our side to receive the data and it will it should it will be arriving to the mu-69 system in uh January 2019 so more to come um here is a close approach the close approach geometry and I won't spend too much time on it but you can see essentially that the close approach fly by all the meat and the juicy stuff that we got were images and data crammed into essentially an eight hour nine hour period stretch of time and uh so uh you can imagine the precision with which the instruments need to be operating on and and and so on this is of course beyond anything that I could put my head around this is high tech very clever engineering work and those guys deserve a big tip of the hat and uh they did an amazing job and all the people that made that part happen um made our life very easy so let's get to the let's get to it so here is um the highest resolution image full frame we call this the lorry full frame images of world Pluto and Sharon Pluto on the left Sharon on the right and uh this is a a color this is the color mvic so this is a little bit lower resolution than the highest resolution lorry images but we get on this end we have the the color images this is the visual color I neglected to mention that mvic has these uh the other camera which has is basically imaging in four color bands in the visual bit so there is the lisa instrument and there's the mvic and mvic has basically a red green and a blue and then at what we call the methane van there is a particular wavelength in the visual where methane absorbs quite strongly and that's a deep red and so we have those four and this is a composite of um that image of that of those snapshots taken with mvic uh so I'm going to I'm going to get into some more uh depth with this momentarily I just want you to sort of uh absorb and enjoy the grandeur that is the system uh so here is especially a kind of a a place name uh on the for Pluto and we have the uh the basically a bunch of the regions that we've currently identified and we've identified to be geologically interesting and we often we give them uh names now there's a whole story about how the names were selected and there was there had been a um a a uh international web campaign I mean a few years ago where we were collecting names worldwide for suggestions for things for various categories including mostly famous uh famous travelers famous explorers and um and so on so you can kind of see that uh some of the places that we see here obviously Voyager and Hayabusa and Pioneer those were great explorers obviously in this case these were instruments that were sent out in the space of the past uh but you gotta can you can get a sense of kind of the things that we um were um uh the names that we've given here is a nice image of uh Pluto in and as it passed through the um eclipsing uh frame let me just back up here you can see in the uh right about uh one o'clock on um on the day of closest approach uh you see that the new horizons actually the the spacecraft passed right directly behind Pluto and so this is what we see here is the is the shine light that um on the eclipsed side and is breathtaking and we knew pretty much about a couple months after when these images came down and they were very highly resolved that it looks like if you look off the rim here it looks pretty clear that there is haze and there is actually structure in the atmosphere so that was um that was that came to a great great surprise and and many people were quite elated to see such interesting physics kind of taking place now this is a low incidence angle image of the sputnik planum region and this is the southern end of sputnik planum where here if you look to the left you see these giant towering ice blocks and these can tower as high as five kilometers uh this particular region that we're looking at um to the left this mountain range is the hillary mont this is the norge montes or i might have gotten it flipped around i'm sorry i think it's the other way around but this this region is pretty astonishing and uh i just we're still trying to figure out how these things got there so i'll tell you a little bit more about that as a as i cruise on along here the sputnik planum itself is this big giant nitrogen ice sea and then you see that on the right and this is the southern end of it you know i'll say some few more words about that in a moment this is the envik image composite so that as i had mentioned earlier that's the images taken with the envik camera in the four color bands and this was essentially kind of assembled together kind of in this psychedelic tone which is quite nice and it gives you essentially each of the colors here indicate um various kind of various types of topography um and chemical composition now what they are we're still trying to figure that out but it kind of gives you a sense of the the uh variety that is the that is pluto surface itself let me show you a couple of images here now um which focuses on the various absorption features that are associated with the surface so this is based on the lisa camera that i was telling you a little about before and you see essentially this is an image of the surface and then associated with that particular image is the location of a particular ice particular volatile absorption wavelength so this is some there's an absorption feature in i let's say in i forget what the number is but it's in the infrared regime essentially you can see where the majority of the methane ice is present and it's pretty much all over the place which is pretty uh quite amazing uh this region tartars dorsa is very interesting because it shows prominent methane absorption and we have some ideas about what that might mean about what that region is composed of you also will notice down on the lower left that the cattura regio region itself shows a particular absence of um of methane absorption so just what we're doing is we're trying to make sense of how these particular locations and absorption features on the planet correlate with what we see geologically and geomorphologically um here's a similar image associated with the nitrogen ice absorption and um and you can see here that the nitrogen ice is also quite prevalent but is particularly prevalent in the sputnik plonum region the region that's uh was commonly referred or the tombal regio itself was called the heart of Pluto and this would be the left ventricle or well that'd be the right ventricle depends on what side of Pluto you're on right uh the um you can see that sputnik plonum has a tremendous amount of nitrogen absorption is pretty clear that that is a giant nitrogen ice pool c um similarly because of the similar bond structures that are shared in common between nitrogen and two and and carbon monoxide co the co and nitrogen generally appear together when they do appear on the surface but the co absorption and the amount of co is considerably less but nonetheless you see that there is quite a bit of met carbon monoxide on the surface of sputnik plonum so uh you know it's not the kind of place that you want to make you want your spacer to have a leak or a way for carbon monoxide to penetrate and contaminate your oxygen supply uh because that would be bad and you die but but it's provided that doesn't happen yet this would be a great place to go and study the behavior of these ices at these low temperatures and that's one of the things I get to at the very end for us it's very exciting to see that what we see of Pluto is that it's an active low temperature physics laboratory one that you couldn't it's very difficult to actually reproduce on earth but here we have it and we see it actually doing something so it's really kind of uh that's exciting for all of us I have to say um here is a corresponding water ice absorption image and you can see where the water ice is and it's pretty much concentrated in the Cthulhu regio region and in off in many of the Highland regions surrounding the the the plant the region around say sputnik plonum itself let me show you this was released on the nasa web page about two three weeks ago and this is an updated so this is what happens when you update your data and we're getting more data coming down and we're able to refine our our maps that we're making so on the left is the old water absorption map and on the right is the updated one so we have we were able to generate a lot of improvement in that and and you can see here in the this region which is the tom the Cthulhu regio region which is very dark also shows a strong prominence for water absorption as well so suggesting that the dark material is probably a bunch of you know organic compounds that have rained down onto the surface and that surface is primarily water ice and it's got all this kind of basically you can think of it as ash but we call tholins as rain down on the surface itself so it's something that we are many of the guy folks over in the atmospheres and composition team are actively trying to work out and develop a better model understanding of the processes that lead to that coloration and and what else we might be actually seeing on the surface but that's a talk for someone else who's actually an expert here i want to just show you basically what the professional geologists and planetary geologists on our team including my colleague oliver white he has gone through these painstaking details mapping out various what we call units the geologic features and and then essentially color coding them and kind of as a personal map from us this is not a geologic map this is basically a map of units what we call units various terrain types and whatnot that we're still trying to figure out what they are so just kind of give you a sense of like how much data and and stuff that we're dealing with so it's also pretty exciting because there's just like so much here to understand um here's some more place names around sputnik planum kind of a this is a these are the a number of lorry images and if you look over to the left here you can see we have in sputnik planum we have a number of features which are essentially water ice blocks that have floated out into the middle of sputnik planum i don't know this is something that many of you are aware of but it turns out that nitrogen ice itself is more dense than water ice so in the same way as you have glaciers on the surface of of the earth near the poles similarly water ice blocks themselves if they make it out onto the sputnik planum are likely to be floaters and they float along and until some of the process either pulls it down or they disintegrate things that we don't yet fully understand but it is kind of quite interesting if you look here to the right you see the uh norge montes which is the mountain range that i showed you the low incidence angle image and then just north of it the hillary montes and these blocks themselves which as i said before tower up to four or five kilometers from the base of the the visual base like ie sputnik planum itself these are all water ice blocks so whether or not they're actually rooted to the base of the base of sputnik planum the basin itself or whether or not they're floating uh we don't know but it's quite likely that if they are just lone ice bits that are floating out that they are indeed floating and and uh so a lot of working needs to be done on this of course but that that's kind of where we are thinking as a team is that we have we're starting to think about a lot of the the physics associated with that here is another image again mapping out um done by oliver white as well uh uh sort of designating the various landforms that we have on the surface and i want to get now to some of the good stuff that we have kind of all over the place so you essentially the middle bit here is primarily water i mean nitrogen ice and as well as the the the lighter blue region but the textures begin to show variation as you make your way from the middle out towards the edge i won't go into much depth about that right now but the the the the way that this is a we're approaching this thing in a way that makes it it gives us a lot of elements to start working to understand in terms of separate units of things so uh go on to the next let's get into some of the good stuff so that this is a high resolution image of the middle of sputnik planum itself and you can see here to the left you see essentially we have a bunch of polygonal ovoid patterns and it is likely that this is an example of where it's what's called solid state convection uh nitrogen ice under these conditions is effectively very mushy something in between um kind of night like water ice grains and and say silly putty let's say something in between in between the two it has this very interesting feature that is it's easily deformable and it's actually quite insulating um in fact nitrogen ice is about uh about 20 times more insulating than water ice so it turns out that based on the certain calculations that are done that the interior of of uh of Pluto uh has there is a geothermal gradient that comes out from the interior of the planet and that's a do radioactive decay of various elements like uranium and thorium just much like with the earth and that's enough to drive buoyant convection in this nitrogen ice material and what i mean by buoyant convection and you can see here is sort of a simulation of buoyant convection under conditions that are somewhat similar uh to the nitrogen ice we see here is basically when you have a fluid and you heat it by heating a fluid element of it becomes more buoyant i.e less dense and it floats to the surface but when it comes to the surface it seizes the outside it sees outer space and that fluid then cools off but in cooling off it um it the density goes up and then as a result you can actually set up this giant cycle and that's basically what you see here kind of depicted in this numerical simulation where you have this material is rising makes its way to the surface and then kind of slides over in this conveyor belt type of fashion this is actually a simulation that's meant to be somewhat representative of what we think is going on in the interior of Pluto itself but there's a lot of active work and a lot of individual groups that are working on this problem but you kind of gives you a sense of the time scales that we think is are actually active so this looks quite vigorous and active but this has taken place over tens of thousands of years so just kind of give you a flavor right so here's another nice work that was done by Oliver White and the others on the on our geology mapping team and essentially the dark regions that you see the dark lines is actually a outlines of the the cell boundaries associated with the convection itself and what's nice about this is that it gives you a sense of uh i ought to add that the boundaries of the cells themselves are places where nitrogen ice is actually descending down and towards the interior now how deep the sputnik quantum we don't know but estimates put it anywhere between say two kilometers deep to up to five kilometers deep and this is actually currently an area of active active research and i might add debate as uh as good scientists tend to do it tend to debate and they tend to question and so we don't know how deep it is but it could be anywhere between those then two extreme numbers so it kind of gives you a sense of this this picture is quite nice we jokingly call it the brain it's not a brain obviously i mean don't quote me on that but it's a map of the the downwelling locations anyways let me move on here i'll skip over this um uh this is an image of the uh the um the mountain range called the Al Idrisi mountain range which is on the northwestern end of sputnik planum and these are water ice blocks and we really don't know how they got there but they do look like they came from the highlands that surrounds sputnik planum itself so they probably came from regions further northwest of where these blocks are actually located um and as i mentioned before these water ice block these water blocks themselves are primarily water ice so it's possible that and these are indeed also as i mentioned earlier bits that are floating off into the interior um the origin the wise we don't know yet but this is stuff that we're actively working on here's something that i actually am deeply involved with and it's the question of glacial ice and glacial flow onto sputnik planum itself and this is a this is a a fascinating image where it shows clearly an example of um of of flow that has come from the highlands and the highlands here are over to the right these are color coded so that red is high elevation and the purple blue or low elevation and um if you look very closely you can see what appears to be flow lines and what are called glacial moraines the darkened materials in the icy flats that spill out into sputnik planum itself um are in are an indication of uh kind of a flow pattern uh probably debris that was left behind and you can kind of see as well where the red arrows are pointed locations where the uh flow what are what we call flow lobes um where the extent of this particular flow event kind of reached uh so this is nitrogen ice and it's likely this nitrogen ice over time had built up in the highlands and made its way down in the flats below um what's also interesting is if you look kind of carefully you can see just above this red arrow here the top red arrow on the left you see a bunch of individual blocks these are water ice blocks themselves and they are possibly possibly might have come uh from the highlands themselves so that's stuff that we're kind of uh trying to you know make good sense of here is an image that is um quite fascinating and this is an example what we think is consistent with but we don't know for sure consistent with the notion that maybe this is a cryovolcano and this is essentially these are these beautiful mounds and uh they're quite high uh and they um have these deep vents and the structures themselves are quite new and we judge them to be quite new because there's a clear absence of uh of craters in the zone surrounding them so uh i i don't want to say too much about this right now because this is part of the paper that's coming out in a couple of days but just to kind of give you a sense that uh this is the case uh the top image is uh what's called right mounds and the one below is called card mounds and um yeah well i and i so those are the actual images themselves and then to the left to the right you see essentially the um the elevation maps associated with it i won't give you those numbers uh but if you wait a couple days you can get those numbers as well um now whether or not uh cryovolcanism what is it made of what we know is that this material is probably water ice itself and uh and right the moment it doesn't appear to be active but due to the lack of craters around it yeah it's probably active or came about in the geologic recent history what that is as well as something you're going to have to kind of read about in the paper in a couple of days um we also have very clear evidence of tectonism past tectonism on the surface and uh okay and uh it's really quite a beautiful image this is an image of the region of uh uh tombow ridge i'm sorry um kutulu regio and you can see here the giant crack uh what's called in on a fasse and that giant crack um kind of settles on to this what's called the eliate crater it looks like this giant eyeball looking back at you and what's amazing about this system is that this is uh in the middle of the crater is a lot of nitrogen ice and it we don't know what those what looks what looks like the bloodshot eye the the bloodshot vessels but we think there's probably I you know it could be a number of things but it's clearly nitrogen ice and it's got some kind of activity going on inside there i'm sorry not in honorific this is virgil fasse excuse me i'll skip over that i'll skip over this this is the cliff retreat and this is a region which is quite interesting looks like what we call scar retreat um is a region in the northwestern bit of sputnik planum and it looks like this is a land form that's undergoing sublimation and in doing so the land form is degrading and taking on the shape that we see here periplanitia and vega terra are essentially separated by these cliffs that are um you know a kilometer or so deep and it's probably uh something that's a process in which this this cliff form is likely retreating the upper regions have lots of methane the lower regions like the periplanitia area has lots of water ice and a clear absence of methane so the idea being you're seeing some kind of methane driven sublimation process um similarly we have this famous place thing called the bladed terrain the snakeskin terrain and uh the uh the uh this region is um as is primarily made of nitrogen um methane ice and you see the snakeskin texture um these textures the slopes associated with them are very steep and we are not really clear on how this structure comes about um we have a number of very uh uh sexy speculative ideas about where they came from again something that you but i would highly recommend that you tune in in a few days and you'll hear some more about that um all right so i'm going to skip over this uh when i want to get to this point here and then i want to say a few words about um uh uh charon implication of crater statistics shows that there is a wide range of ages represented on the surface some bits are very old up to four billion years old and some regions for instance but the planum very young in fact we can't actually date how young it is it's that young because there's no evidence of craters in that in that region as it as an example so it's uh it's so exciting because as i said earlier this is a system which is geologically active it ain't dead and it's doing a lot of things it's keeping all of us busy trying to make sense of um let me just do i i want to get through this and i want to show you some pictures of the rocks i'm sadly i wish if i had a little bit more time and that's uh normally this talk i have is an hour long talk uh i would say some a lot more about charon one of the major things about charon that has caught our attention is that charon has the strong tectonic belt which probably came about from the freezing likely due to the freezing of its liquid water ammonium mixed ocean which is uh that was present way back when many billions of years ago but as the planet as the moon cooled off that ocean froze and in freezing causes an expansion and these these uh these cracks you see as a result of uh extensional cracking as we call it but what's interesting is that the northern half of the regions north of it are this very rugged terrain rugged cratered terrain and the regions south of it are relatively smooth also cratered but not nearly as much but very smooth plains and so the the question of interest is why the asymmetry um we don't we can't really say a lot about that right now um but uh i just kind of want to give you a flavor of that region here uh you see that the uh the the vulcan planum itself is relatively relatively cool uh relatively flat also it's pretty cool from a like kind of wow kind of cool perspective but the it's they're relatively uh very smooth and it's probably you know a result of ancient viscous very slushy ice flow back way back when three to four billion years ago probably right around when sharon was still active in its interior but now that that activity is long gone and the sharon is essentially it's a is geologically dead by by comparison here's a very nice image of sharon at a relatively high um resolution and this image was released back in december and so yeah you can kind of kind of gaze upon the wonder that's this uh the system i uh i wish i could dwell on this a bit more but kind of running out of time let me i'm going to skip over to last few slides um the images that we see here are of the moons the small little moonlets and you kind of get a sense here for the uh the scales that we're looking at um and we had a whole team of people uh devoted to studying not just the shape but how the moons rotate on their axes and how they orbit around the uh around the pluto sharon system and um that kind of gives you a flavor of kind of what we're what we're um what we're we're dealing with um many ideas that we've had especially of hydra and possibly even curb us is that these are actually these are these are composite structures where two smaller rocks merged together to form structures that we're seeing again these are still hypotheses and still undergoing tremendous amount of tests but that's some of the things that work the ideas that we're kicking around in terms of trying to make sense of the system um here's some you uh i'll leave i'll skip over this as sort of a list of the various properties of the small moons and i just want to show you this this is essentially based on detailed studies of the relative orientations of the moons during the course of the flyby we're able to actually extract number including the flyby and also including um from observations made of the system before we can kind of we made a bit of a a a movie of how the the moons orbit each other and for some reason sadly it is not um here let's try it this way so you all can see that just a minute well i'm sorry it's um this is a not running but in the upcoming days when we post the full file associated with this you'll see this movie run and one of the things that would be interesting to keep in mind is that uh hydra the further the moon that's furthest out spins extremely fast compared to the other moons so it also poses kind of a theoretical conundrum for for the theorists on the team who work on orbital dynamics and and the evolution of sort of lumpy objects you know in orbit um co so i'm getting close to the end this is a this is the famous space artist from the you know 40s 50s and 60s chesley bonestos that was actually his vision of what Pluto might be looking like and you know it was incredibly prescient by many people's standards this is the artist rendition of the similar uh of Pluto as well and this is when i started to talk off with and um so uh you know it uh you know the artists uh who were thinking about these things kind of uh in this case kind of had it right i mean i'm not saying this is absolutely right but it's definitely very similar to things that we see on the surface of Pluto so i kind of want to end it with that um that i was had time i was going to hopefully have some time for um uh some 3d images but i think um that won't be uh possible uh but hopefully in the updated version of the powerpoint file i will provide for you all after the embargo period is up and i'll provide those images as well so you can enjoy them um at home well i guess that's basically it for me um i uh is uh yeah well thank you very much uh dr umar han so that was a you know i really enjoyed that i thought that it was a fantastic images and really a lot of insights and we do have a few questions from some of the listeners and we've had a grand total of 69 different people have logged in during the course of this and so that's pretty good so we had a question from a long time ago uh porgy asks for his son and i'm not sure how to pronounce his name came on uh i believe nine years old asks why does Pluto have a heart why does Pluto have a heart uh we don't know i mean uh the only thing that we can surmise is that this region where it looks like a heart uh and especially the sputnik planum region the left side of that heart is likely to be a very very deep it's a deep basin and it may be a vestige of the original impact event that created the the charon pluto system itself uh but again we we don't know uh but uh it is likely to be the low part the lowest part of Pluto kind of almost like a death valley of Pluto but this death valley is filled in with all this nitrogenized so yeah it's it's one of those things that we don't quite know but uh we are working on that problem that's for sure we're trying to ask that question and try to get an answer for it great thank you jim small asks in the lower left of one of the charon photos there's a nearly linear string of craters is that a coincidence they were uh to the left of the word smooth uh let's see here i can't are you all able to see my screen um can you make it larger can you put it full screen on yours oh yeah i can i just i think i have lost the uh here we go oh here here we go how's that great and so the lower left and left of the word smooth left of the word i don't see what you're speaking of here maybe we're talking about charon here right yes i actually think it was one of the earlier images here let me go back then there lower left uh oh this i see a string here well i mean the string crater events are common especially uh in the outer solar system when you have these incident angle approaches for objects that are say giant meteors or whatever they may be they will break up and when as they pass over they can break up and then basically leave a trace of the the trajectory that that that you know the object itself was undergoing so oftentimes when you see strings like that it's a sign of that type of impact type of impact event i am not a specialist by the way in um and in crater impacts and the impact physics as well so that's the best i can kind of answer i can give you i can tell you about other things i can and if you want i can also send contact information for the people on our team to do work on that okay great thank you uh kathy east asks a question and and since i'm a geologist this is a good question too um how can assumptions be made on the age based on the lack of craters when there's no baseline to compare it to how do geologists know a timeline for cratering or if cratering is common in this section of the solar system yeah the cratering now there is uh there many okay so this goes back to uh the solar system history itself and there was a phase uh during right after the planets have formed uh in which the solar system was essentially going through this rearrangements self rearrangement and that's called the late heavy bombardment and that occurred about a half a half a billion to a billion years after uh the planets and essentially the bulk of the solar system itself had formed and during that period of time during the late heavy bombardment all the remaining debris of the solar system itself was either churned up eaten up by the sun or spat out into the far reaches of uh out of the system itself now the numbers and statistics associated with that late heavy bombardment itself those are fairly fairly well known so what many of the theorists then can do is you you you can take the the density of impactors as a function of time and then you run events on terms of how many impacts you expect during late heavy late heavy bombardment and then from that you leave an imprint on the surface as well so based on all the various models that are associated with the late heavy bombardment phase of the solar system's history you can essentially measure the size of the craters that you see and you find the smallest ones that are resolvable and the smallest ones that are resolvable are the ones that are the oldest ones that are I mean in the following sense that smaller craters degrade faster than larger craters so you by assessing where the crater distribution on the surface turns off you can actually pin an age associated with that surface and so based on that and the based on what you observe coupled with what is expected from theory to be the case during the late heavy bombardment you can kind of correlate and establish a time and that time is is what we use to indicate what the various ages and so as far as regions of Pluto and Charon are concerned some regions show a copious amount of craters and you can actually clearly date that region and some regions like a planum show no craters so if there were craters from before they got washed out because of the activity that's taking place so we can't tell you how old it is but we can tell you how old it isn't it's kind of like you flip the you kind of flip the the reasoning around so for instance with Sputnik Planum we can pretty safely say that it is no younger I mean no older than 10 million years which is a very small fraction compared to the in the history of the of the system itself so that's kind of roughly how we kind of think about these things well we're we're past time but we're going to go one last question and then then we'll wrap up here and so Orkin if you could go ahead and turn your screen share off that would be a good thing to ask so the last question that I'm opposing we're going to end up having to leave a couple of really good questions on the on the table here but Bruce Tinkler asks what is the most surprising thing you've learned about Pluto from the New Horizons flyby the most surprising thing uh I mean I for me personally uh I don't I'm not saying I speak for the team but for me personally the most surprising thing was to discover a place that was active and that was a like I mentioned earlier like a low temperature physics laboratory uh to see the nitrogen glacier ice and to see and for me personally um to see also that there's green convection in the ice that we're observing and almost textbook like you know things that we don't normally see in nature but we see in textbooks and you kind of see that also on the surface itself it's that was very surprising it was almost like a gift from the heavens you know that here is some data to look at and you can develop your theoretical understandings of what's going on and it uh and oh like a gift so for me it was surprising to see such pristine examples of so many geophysical processes in in a very clean way so that's me you know that keep me busy for the next uh you know dozen years I think even yeah well great well this has been most informative I want to thank you very much for joining us and I look forward to seeing the full resolution of the images and so we'll close in just a moment but as promised earlier I said that we were going to have a little raffle for this lovely book which our Vivian and David who are also on the night sky network team were co-authors of this and so we we keep on trying to think of what's the best way to be able to raffle this off to everyone and so we hit upon this and so if everyone's ready in the chat window we're going to take the sixth person to type in the number six and Vivian's going to keep track of who's doing this so okay I think we're well all past six now so Vivian will keep track of that and she will send you a little note and and connect with you so that uh we can make sure that the book comes to you so a little congratulations to Skip Bird oh my so congratulations Skip so okay well that's all for tonight uh you can find this telecom along with many or this webinar along with many others on the night sky network webpage under the Outreach Forces section section just search for webinar tonight's presentation posted on the night sky network youtube page and dedicated research page will be up by the end of the week with all of those nice full resolution embargoed images and the 3d images as well and so get your anaglyph glasses out and tune them up for some good good viewing and so good night everyone keep looking up and mark your calendars for our next webinar on Monday April 18th when we will hear from Dr. Larry Knitler on the Mercury messenger mission from one end of the solar system to the other and mark your calendar for Monday May 9th for a very nice transitor mercury thank you very much we'll see you next month and good night