New Video of Pluto and Charon ~ The Wobbly Dance

A short time-lapse “movie” was shot of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon. The images were taken by Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, which is closer to Pluto than any spacecraft has ever been.

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The movie was made over about a week, from Jan. 25-31, 2015. It was taken as part of the mission’s second optical navigation (“OpNav”) campaign to better refine the locations of Pluto and Charon in preparation for the spacecraft’s close encounter with the small planet and its five moons on July 14, 2015.

Charon is about half Pluto’s width and somewhere around one-eighth to one-tenth its mass, and with a center-to-center orbit of roughly 20,000 km, the center of mass for this system is actually above Pluto’s surface.

If the icy surface of Charon is cracked, analysis of the fractures could reveal if its interior was warm, perhaps warm enough to have maintained a subterranean ocean of liquid water, according to a 2012 NASA-funded study. Pluto, which was once considered a planet — resides in the Kuiper Belt (a vast collection of frozen objects that orbit our Sun about 30 to 50 astronomical units (AUs) away).

Pluto is an extremely distant world, orbiting the sun more than 29 times farther than Earth. With a surface temperature estimated to be about 380 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (around minus 229 degrees Celsius), the environment at Pluto is far too cold to allow liquid water on its surface. Pluto’s moons are in the same frigid environment.

Although temperatures on Pluto’s surface hover around -230 °C, but researchers have long wondered whether the dwarf planet might boast enough internal heat to sustain a liquid ocean under its icy exterior.

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Source: http://goo.gl/grIKS8.

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