Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcomed up Forward Thinking, the podcast that looks at the future and says ice and silence and dark skies as we go around another year. I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Bolcabon, I'm Joe McCormick. That kind of put me in a in a moody mood, melancholy mood. That song I don't normally talk about the lyrics I pick, but this, in this case I'm going to. That song is called I'm Your Moon. It's by Jonathan Colton, and it's about Pluto and Karen, and it's it's Karen singing to Pluto after Pluto has been downgraded from planet to dwarf planet, saying it's all right, I'm still here with you and we're revolving around each other. You know, that's the thing. When people get upset about Pluto not being a planet anymore, I'm like, what's wrong with being a dwarf planet. It's kind of insulting to Series and all these other dwarf planet that are pretty cool. Well, I think Colton's point was that the designation was almost created for Pluto and Thereford, that's when it's an insult. We're not calling you that anymore. We're calling you this new thing that you are, and and nothing else that we've classified yet is but the reason why we chose that lyric, or why I chose that lyric in the first place. Yeah, act like we have any say whenever I'm not hear you guys, pay lyrics. Um. But no, we we are going to cover new horizons the probe that has gone on this amazing mission to Pluto, the flyby of Pluto, and to talk about everything that went into making that mission possible, as well as the some of the science that we've learned so far, knowing that we've got so much more to learn from this mission, and it's really just a cool story. It's amazing that I grew up learning about Pluto as one of the planets in our Solar system in my science books, and I remember, you know, learning all the names of the planets and thinking about Pluto is just another one of them. But I think I didn't realize when I was a kid how we had never gotten a close look at Pluto. Oh yeah, yeah, And I mean depending on when you were learning about it. I don't think that we had any concept about even what the atmosphere of the planet looked like until yea, So when I was a kid going to school, we didn't know anything about Pluto's atmosphere. Yeah, they were there. They were just making it up. They were just like, hey, so there's this planet called Pluto out there. Yeah it's and you know it's it's it's probably I see, pretty young in our our scientific knowledge, Like if you look at that, you know when we learned of these different planets. The discovery of Pluto dates back to nineteen thirty who discovered by Clyde Townbo who named you know, was able to discover this planet, which got him a great deal of fame in astronaut Uncle Circles, who was Clyde uh clients. It was an interesting guy, very eccentric, astronomer, very he loved puns. So I think I would have gotten along with Clyde really well a guy non eccentric astronomers. Is that a subcategory of the field. There could be some who are just very you know, very middle of the road kind of astronomers. I don't know. I think of astronomers as being dreamers, so I often think of them as being eccentric. I'm sure you have your astronomical accountants, the people who their favorite part of the job is logging the coordinance of the new object, creating new spreadsheet mechanisms to to sort the data, naming those objects on nonsequential series of like the CR one oh five nine point a R four so droll so uh tumbo discovered Pluto, but later on we would discover much more about this that it has five moons that we know of. There may be more, the largest of which is Karen, which is more than half the size of Pluto if you're going by diameter. There's also sticks, Nicks, cabarros, and Hydra. We've got a lot of Hellish names going on here. The idea being that when you come out from interstellar space and you start entering into the Solar System, you first passed through the Alter realm, the hellish Alter got to go through Hell to get to us kind of or you know, it's the icy mouth of Satan out there. To be fair, the the idea of the underworld and the and the the area beyond life in Greek mythology doesn't have quite the same connotations, not necessarily a place of punishment for it, but we do get these like sort of like negative afterlife kind of feelings. Which Pluto, he's the god of the dead, right and and you know if a lot of very popular depictions of that character cast that cast him in a villainous or or malevolent light. Yeah, was he in the Disney Hercules. Was the Hades with the fire hair? Yeah, played by James Would Yeah, thank you, but definitely the equivalent to Pluto. Yes, okay, so you got Pluto, you got you got sticks. That's the river you have to cross to get to the underworld. Also an amazing arena band. Right there you go. And then Karen is the fairy operator who gets you across the right. Yeah, who you? You have the coins that you have to have so that he will fare you across. Now, I don't know quite about the other ones. Care bros. That's uh, I don't know, okay, Well, hydra Hydra's the multi headed Oh yeah, yeah, I know that one, all right, you know that one? Hale hydra ra Uh, you know, I don't know what you guys are talking. Cares that's the Greek pronunciation for We often will get a soft Sea Serberus, the three headed dog. Okay, so um, yeah, it's uh. And by the way, I have a friend from high school who is uh, very knowledgeable in Greek mythology, and if he's listening to this episode, I do apologize for butchering the pronunciation of all these names, because I know I am, But these were discovered later on, and this was really the New Horizons mission was our really our first chance to get a close look at these various bodies. Before we had had a lot of pretty blurry images from various telescopes. Oh yeah, if you googled images of Pluto just a couple of months ago, you would get artists illustrations, but then you'd also get a photograph from the Hubble telescope that was basically a disc of yellow and black blurs. Yeah, it's it's funny because NASA has actually released a series of photos that have been taken over time of Pluto, so you can actually see our view of Pluto. Yeah, it's really impressive. But before we get into the actual mission, I thought i'd talk a little bit just kind of a quick overview of the history of planetary exploration using probes, because it kind of tells you, you know, how how difficult this problem was and why it's been so why it took so long for us to get a close look at Pluto. Yeah. Also just to put in real quick, because we forgot one of these moons. Nicks is the goddess of the night. I didn't mention Nick, thank you very much. Similar I think they're related. So I think it's one of those weird Zeus things and Nicks. It's awesome. I just wanted to put in, don't don't want to forget anybody out there. I just like that. We've got a real rock in episode so far. Alright, So alright, No, I'm not going to go down that route. So the first successful UH mission, a fly by mission using a probe would be back in nineteen sixty two with the Mariner Too. That went by Venus because the first time we sent a probe on a fly by mission of another planet, and it was the first mission to perform a successful fly by. But it wasn't our first try as a as a you know, as humanity's first try wasn't the first one. The first try was with the Soviet Union in nineteen sixty one with the Sputnik seven probe that was meant to land on Venus, but it never escaped Earth orbits. So yeah, well, and this story happens over and over for both the Soviets and for the United States. I mean, this was this was during the Space race, right, No, I'm not making fun. Yeah, sad trombone noises that would go along with the rest of this this section here. Yeah, And and other attempts that would follow spot Nick seven but we're also unsuccessful, were the Venera one and the Mariner one and the spot Nick nineteen pro uh. And it wouldn't be until Mariner two that we actually got a good look at Venus. Next came Mars actually, so we didn't go to Mercury. Next, we went to Mars. And that was the Mariner four as the first successful fly by probe. That was in nineteen sixty four, and I believe it was on July four of nineteen sixty four, which happens to be the same date that we achieved this Pluto fly by. Cool, that's an interesting coincidence. Other attempts to get to Mars included Mariner three, spot Next twenty two and twenty four, and the Mars one and Mars Nick one and two probes. Actually those two had been launched back in nineteen sixty, so if Mars Nick one and two had been successful, they would have actually preceded the Venus fly by, but they were not successful. Then we checked out Mercury in nineteen seventy three with the Mariner four. Voyager one and two flew by Jupiter and Saturn. In nineteen seventy seven, Voyager two would also go by Uranus and Neptune. So we had looks at all the other planets, but Pluto remained so far out there, uh, that we had not had a chance to check it out. And so we launched the New Horizons probe way back in two thousand six. So it took more than eight years for it to go from Earth to Pluto. Uh. And it's funny because it almost didn't happen. We almost didn't have a New Horizons project, and if it had not happened when it did, we would have had a really long wait ahead of us to give it another go. So NASA had been debating on a Pluto mission for decades, and one of the proposed missions was called the Pluto Kuiper Express. Back in two thousand Kuiper referring to the Kuiper Belt, which is sort of like the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but much bigger and on the very outskirts of our solar systems, way way out there. Yeah, lots of frozen not just water, ice, but methane and other hydrocarb and uh So, the budget for this proposed mission just kept growing as time went on. Things were getting tagged on. This was during a pretty rough period during NASA's history. Yeah, this was during a lot of the Space Shuttle trouble and stuff like that. Yeah, and budget cuts they were they were facing big budget cuts, and there were budget plans that were proposed that didn't have money set aside specifically for missions like this, which also caused a problem. But eventually NASA ended up canceling this project when it just got too complicated and too expensive, and that prompted the NASA Associate Administrator Ed Wiler to say that the plans to visit Pluto were officially dead for the foreseeable future. And here is why. So, Pluto's got a really enormous orbit, right gigantic, Yeah, and not exactly as close to circular as many of the other orbits, right, Yeah, it kind of dips in and out. Yeah, it's kind of what we might call an ex and trick orbit. And if NASA didn't get a spacecraft on the way to Pluto within a few years of two thousand, while it was as most interesting, we would miss that opportunity. Well most interesting. Aren't planets always kind of interesting? Well, they're always kind of interesting, but some can be more interesting than others, and some can be more interesting at one time of the year than another. For example, when Pluto is closer to the Sun, its atmosphere is gaseous, or so we suspected, So we suspected. But when it moves further out, scientists were worried that the temperature of the planet would become so cold that the atmosphere itself would freeze and fall to the ground. So you imagine, like if you've ever seen any of those cartoons or anything where someone says something and their words freeze in the air, and then it's kind of like that, but for real, z's that. I feel like I have felt cold before. I don't think I think I need to redefine. Yeah, you know, we're talking like, you know, seriously cold here where where things that would be in gas form here on Earth would be would be solid there on Pluto. So we wanted to be able to look at Pluto when it's atmosphere would still be an atmospheric form, but because of that enormous orbit, we would only have a certain operation, a certain window of opportunity. Um Pluto takes two hundred forty seven point six eight earth years to go around the Sun once, and if we missed that point where that that range where the atmosphere would remain in gas form as far as we could tell, then we'd have more than two centuries to wait to try it again. And that that's that's that's a really long term budget plan, even for NASA exactly right, And then they'd be like, well, why bother planning anything, because by the time we'd get around to launch all, all the technology is going to be different anyway. So it was very disheartening to those who wanted to look at Pluto back in two thousand when this mission was canceled. So in order to get to Pluto in time to check out this atmosphere, they had one other chance, which was to use one of the other planets in our Solar system as kind of a boost. Right, This is the Jupiter Gravity Assist, and New Horizons is not the only spacecraft that has used this. We We've talked about this a bunch on the show. It's it's basically, when you get a probe or or spacecraft near the orbit of something big enough to kind of uh, let it be captured by the planet and then keep going. So so it like it like gets this forward boost by by temporarily kind of kind of riding in the slip stream of the planet almost and then like like that skateboard and back to the future. That's exactly what I was gonna say. It's like when Marty gets on the back of the truck and uses the truck to accelerate on the skateboard much faster than his little toe push could ever get him. Right. Yeah, So the the you might think, well, if we have Jupiter there, then what's the big worry? We can just use jubiter Well, Jupiter orbits too. Yeah, And and Jupiter's orbit and Pluto's orbit, aren't you know, it's not like they're always in alignment, so you only have the amount of time where you can still correct for the trajectory you're going to get with the gravity assist so that you're still heading in the right direction so that you ultimately pass by Pluto. Uh. And the scientists had figured out that they needed to have this uh they need to have a launch before really January two thousand six or right around there in order to take advantage of this. Now it turns out that they actually got there a little later than that because the calculations weren't uh like like they they had kind of been conservative by saying, if we don't get there by January two thou six, we don't get there at all, or if we don't launch by January two thousand six, there's no point in doing it. But uh, the point was that they needed to launch from Earth because it was going to take time to go from Earth to Jupiter and then even more time obviously to go from Jupiter to Pluto. So they used this new idea. They kind of started pitching this around and there was a new group formed in NASA to design a mission that would become New Horizons, and they estimated the cost would be five hundred million dollars, which would include the rocket needed to launch the spacecraft, so not just that the spacecraft cost five million, they're saying the whole thing. Yeah, considering how we taught so many times about how expensive getting stuff into spaces, Uh, it's actually pretty pretty uh decent, you know, as far as space missions are concerned. Um. So they proposed this in two thousand one. There was a competitive mission pitch process where NASA was entertaining mission pitches from various parts of the organization, and as administration said, all right, let's fund this one. Let's see if we can make it happen. Uh. So the funding came from earmarks and budgets placed by members of Congress because the president his budget plan did not cover anything that would go to this kind of mission. So, in other words, it took an Act of Congress in order to carve out parts of NASA's budget to allow this to happen. So New Horizons gets the funding it needs from this Act of Congress. But there still were some other issues before it got to the point where I was doing a fly by of Pluto. Well, yeah, I know, it's had some onboard computer problems. Yeah, Um, just after the gravitational assist from Jupiter, it had a computer issue that wasn't even the one I was talking about you were thinking of the one that was almost that was just before It's fly by. No, they had so cosmic race. We've talked about these before on the podcast. Sure, high energy particles flying through space. Uh, so they can cause computer glitches since see it ends up being like a control all delete thing. It's not like it's it destroys the computer, but it doesn't necessitate a reboot. Um. So, there were cosmic rays that interfered with the computer, and at first the team had anticipated that it would only happen once in New Horizons mission. They thought that the cosmic rays were infrequent enough and the space is huge that the odds were that New Horizons might encounter one. They get, they kind of factored that in. It turned out that it encountered several more on its way to Pluto, and it was fine, it would reboot, everything was okay, So no permanent damage was caused, but it did teach scientists something interesting like, Wow, there's a little bit more of a chance of running into cosmic radiation than we had first anticipated. Yeah, what more of that activity? Uh? And that can control delete kind of thing was also what wound up happening in the more recent computer shutdown. Yes, that was very scary because we were right about to reach Pluto. Yeah, we were like ten days out. Yes, Specifically, what was happening was that the computer aboard the New Horizons was being asked to do two things at once, and it was the combination of the two what gave it Cartesian doubt. It had too much, It required too much computational power. It could not do both of them at once. So instead of trying to do both of them ones and possibly damaging itself in the process, it shut down, went to its backup computer, and so for a while we found home. Found home to say like, hey, hell yeah, exactly what to do about this one? My main brain shut down? Can you guys look into that? And so you know, obviously it takes a long time for information to get between the spacecraft and us. Yeah, for four and a half hours was the time difference at like like right then on that day. So that's you know, a significant delay between getting a message out and being able to reply. Then you have to wait another four and a half hours for the reply to go out, and then you have to wait another four and a half hours to see if it worked. But everything worked out fine. The engineers on the ground said, you know, this is exactly what the computer was supposed to do. If this sort of thing happened, we know how to fix it. Uh. There were some reports that would say in the media that made it seem like the mission itself was in jeopardy. But all the engineers I was reading about, they were like, no, I mean this was you know it. It obviously caused concern because of the timing. Oh yeah, yeah. But and and for that minute when you know, they got the like help message at first, you know, before they could check back in with the computer, there was that moment of them going like, oh, well, is this another computer shutdown or did an asteroid destroy our spacecraft? And no one had any idea for like another four and a half to nine hours. There was always the chance that there could be a collision, and that would have been the end of New Horizons. Yeah. Of the four d and nineties six planned observations, the shut down prevented thirty of them from happening. Uh so so six percent, which which sounds like a kind of large number until you kind of wait, the importance of the observations by how close you actually are to the planet, and this was still so far out, or relatively so far out, that it didn't do any uh irreparable harm that there were most of the stuff I saw was like, it caused thirty of our observations to not happen, but they were thirty of the boring ones. Yeah, I mean I hadn't crossed over into the underworld yet. No. No, it caused a few of our staff members to sleep on the floor of the apl that night. But so I thought we could talk a little bit about some of the instruments that are on the new horizons. These are the things that are gathering the information, and they were purposefully made fairly simple. They decided not to go super elaborate and and load this thing down with you know, a hundred instruments. There are only seven aboard the spacecraft UM and they have great names. Are they also named after demonic entities from the underworld? Yes, Ralph, demonic entity from the underworld, is the first one quake in fear upon the approach of Ralph. Ralph maybe what you do in the underworld, if you're at a certain level of the world that I recall lots of Ralph ing in one of the levels of Dante's inferno. Uh No RALPH is a visible and infrared imager and spectrometer, and it is able to create thermal maps of surfaces and provide color and composition. Uh you know enhancements to images. So a lot of the pictures that we see, by the time we see them, they've gone through a couple of different layers of enhancements so that we can really make sense of what we're seeing. It's not the what the raw data would normally represent. Then you have ALICE, which is an ultraviolet imaging spectrometer, and that's used to examine the composition of Pluto's atmosphere and can also search for an atmosphere around other bodies like Karen Kuiper Belt objects or k b o s. Then you have REX, the Radio Science Experiment. So why isn't it our sex Now I know it's so Radio Science Experiment or REX, which measures atmospheric composition and temperature. It's a radiometer. Then you have LORI l O r r I, the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager, which is a camera with a really amazing telescopic lens um and that is what has been used to take pictures of Pluto's far side, the side that's facing away from us, and it also provides high res images. Then you have SWAP the solar wind around Pluto. It's a spectrometer that analyzes solar wind and plasma and it can also measure the escape rate of Pluto's atmosphere. We'll talk a little bit about Pluto's atmosphere in the second because that's really cool. Uh, pepsi, you can't do that, but pepsi. Yeah, no trademark. So Pluta after the ancient Scandinavian goddess of refreshing beverage carbonation out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Yeah, again, no Pluto. Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation. That's what stands for. It's an energetic particle spectrometer which measures the composition and density of plasma escaping Pluto's atmosphere. So similar to SWAP in that way. And then you have the s d C. The Student dust counter doesn't count student dust. Uh, it's that was designed by students to kill. Yeah, so students designed this instrument and it measures the space dust that new horizons encounters throughout its voyage. So kind of cool and uh, so far it's found tons of science. Ye, surprising things too, things we didn't expect to find. Yeah. Absolutely. The surface color data that we've started getting back indicates that there are three zones on Pluto, a kind of kind of arc zone around the equator, then then mid colored zones around the mid latitudes, and uh, I see looking zones in the polar regions, which the New Horizons team is is guessing is the result of seasonal ice transport from the equator to the poles. By ice transport, we don't necessarily mean like trucks taking ice. Well, you know, I'm not I'm not counting anything out. Yes, you're here. You know. I've seen a lot of talk about the methane forming glaciers and glacial activity. Yeah, the the methane and nitrogen and carbon monoxide are forming glaciers because it is like negative degrees fahrenheit. Very jilly out there. Yeah, super interesting. Also, there's that heart of Pluto regiat. Yeah, so that's one of the big surface features everybody's been noticing and right and drawing cartoons about. Yeah. Yeah, this is the vaguely heart shaped I've also seen several memes of the image of Pluto. The cartoon dog superimposed on top of this particular region, because because from one angle it looks like a you're looking at Pluto in profile. Yeah, there's also the Pluto surface whale. I've also seen. It suggested that since there is you know, no correct way up in space that that we are looking at, that took us of Pluto, oddly enough, not the dark side of Pluto. This lighter colored region appears to be a concentration of carbon monoxide ice but yeah, and intensifies towards the center of that frozen area. So the concentration of carbon monoxide grows as you get towards the center of this mass. But of course, the most scientifically remarkable thing about it is not that it is heart shaped, but that it is so smooth. I mean, isn't it. Yeah. Yeah. One of the odd things is that you would expect there to be a lot more invitations and craters exactly because you would expect, you know, Pluto was actually kind of blasted by other materials, but so we expected to see lots of pits and craters on the surface like you do in the moon. And when you don't see that, then you start have to ask yourself why isn't it like that, then what is going on? That means that why don't we have these craters and pits? Right, So it's typically been suggested, well, if we're looking at a smooth region on Pluto, that must mean that this region, for some reason, is geologically younger than we would expect any part of the surface of Pluto to be. Yeah. In fact, the estimations are that the surface has been geologically active within the last one hundred million years. There's nothing on a geological scale for a plan it's been around for four billion years. In fact, I saw a report from Science magazine that said that the New Horizons team member John Spencer suggested it might even still be active today, which is pretty interesting that. That's also where I think I've seen some of them mentioned about glacial activity. Uh. And so we've got this one region that's informally called the Tombo Region. Within that Tambo region, there is a specific area of of ancient crater terrain where some of the craters have been filled in by very much younger ice. And they're calling this the Cthulhu Reggio because they hate us and our ability to sleep. Yeah, yeah, fathogen uh yeah, And so much, so, so much stuff about this is surprising to us. Getting back into the glaciers that we talked about, we mentioned that before, with the carbon monoxide ice, the nitrogen ice, the methane ice. Uh, that's amazing, and that we don't we don't really understand how all of these different land masses came about, right, you know they that's a large mystery to us too. So there are a couple of different hypotheses that we have about the various cracks and troughs that are on the surface of Pluto and how they might have formed. One is that maybe it was through contraction of the surface, which is like when you have a muddy area and then the sun comes out and it dries. You see those cracks form as the as the mud solidifies into dirt. Sure, okay, So so maybe the orbit of Pluto taking it back into the closer to the sun and letting some of these carbon monoxide glaciers melt. Possibly. Uh. The other possible on another hypothesis is convection, in which Pluto's interior would warm the frozen carbon monoxide. Uh. But that that of course raises questions all on its own, right, like how would that happen. One of the big lingering questions that's left by the new discoveries about Pluto is if we assume that these surface features are explained by heat coming from the interior of Pluto, so geologic act ativity, uh, convection warming coming from the center of planet. Where does that heat come from? Because we wouldn't expect it to be there. I think it's love. Uh yeah, these are these are the This is why the scientists absolutely have been bubbling over with excitement, because it's when you discover stuff and you don't know the answer to the question that really gets people like their imagination going, and they have to start coming up with ideas and then finding ways they might be able to test that. Yeah. So I've read a few just proposed hypotheses. I mean, nobody knows the answer yet. But one of the ideas is that Pluto and its moon Karen were actually formed at a much more recent impact event than was previously thought. You know, the ideas that they formed a long time ago when things were smashing together in the early Solar System. You could explain them having more heat inside if they had formed much more recently than we expected. Another explanation would be if they are compounds present on Pluto and Karen with lower melting points than we would expect, or you could maybe explain it in terms of tidal forces. But I think it's cool that we don't know the answer to this yet. Yeah, No, that's it's it's great in the sense that it gives us goals, right like, now we know these observations, Now we have to explain what caused the stuff we observed. So pretty awesome. Uh, there are other some some other features on Pluto that we should talk about. There's some dark streaks across the plains of Pluto that suggests that wind could have been blowing material across the frozen service. Also, the mountains on Pluto seem to be about a hundred million years old or younger, similar to some of the other features we were talking about mountain building again as evidence of geologic activity. Yeah, and because of that lack of craters again, that tells us, you know, generally, how old they must be, because if they were older, we would expect to see a lot more craters on them. Um. And normally we would say that a planet's a planet's mountains would be formed by some gravitational interaction between other plants that would generate the heat that would lead to major geological activity. But we have to kind of discount that for Pluto. It's too far out there for the that to be a factor. So it's not like the thing. The forces that we understand that act upon other bodies don't necessarily pertain to Pluto. It's too small and too far away for that gravitational interaction to generate the heat necessary at least as far as we understand. And maybe that there's something going on that we had not factored in, and then we have to revise our ideas of what is possible, which is also super exciting. Then we can talk about Pluto's atmosphere, the which was largely a mystery to us. You know, this was the whole reason why we wanted to go when we went, because we wanted to make sure we could observe it while it was still an atmosphere form and not just chunks of ice on the ground. Um So, Pluto's atmosphere has been observed as far out as one thousand miles or six hundred kilometers from its surface, which was much further out than previous observations which were around a hundred seventy miles or two seventy kilometers, and it also contains a haze. There's this there's this great image of Pluto from the far side of Pluto where new Horizons has already gone past the planet, taking pictures back from the way it came right right with sunlight kind of filtering through. Yeah, the atmosphere. It looks like it's the actually filtering. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was gonna say it looks like the cover of the ring from the well where you get that ring of light. But yeah, it's this haze that's around the planet. And and that haze is really interesting, and it's actually a couple of different complex hydrocarbons like ethylene and acetylene, and those are byproducts that's what remains from methane after it's been broken down by a ultraviolet light. So so in the upper atmosphere of Pluto, you've got the solar radiation interacting the atmosphere and smashing up those methane molecules and and kind of dribbling this beautiful haze down onto the surface. Exactly. It falls through the atmosphere of Pluto and condenses on the way down, and that's where we're getting this this haze. I think I read that's where Pluto's red color comes from, isn't it. Yeah, it turns into this reddish brown goop. And so being a scientific term, yes, goop goo, whatever you want, gunk. I mean, there are a lot of different words I could use, um, But at any rate, the hypothesis is, in fact, this is what gives Pluto that color. It may just be a one contributing factor to that. Actually, you know, we can't can't definitively say that that's the main reason or the only reason for the reddish coloration, but it seems to be contributing to it. Uh. And then scientists have been observing some fluctuations in Pluto's atmosphere that changes in the atmospheric pressure. Actually, there were earlier observations that were made where the pressure was at one level, but as new horizons went by, it was much much less. And scientists believe that in fact, we are observing Pluto while it's undergoing a global change in atmosphere. Yeah. Yeah, The atmospheric pressure on the surface of Pluto right now is just one one of Earth's surface pressure. And they measured this by sending radio waves to Pluto as as the probe was passing directly behind it and therefore measuring the distortion of those radio waves through the atmosphere, along getting those really beautiful pictures of the sun filtering through. So super interesting, like it may be that this was just incredibly fortuitous that we are actually looking at this planet in a moment of transformation, and who knows what if this had not worked out and we had not been able to send the probe at this time and we had to wait another couple of centuries, the people that then would look at Pluto would see something fundamentally different and not necessarily even know that it's a different, different condition than what we would have observed, if you know, with new horizons, which is kind of kind of mind blowing really because this is stuff that happens over millennia, so so to see something in that much flux is pretty phenomenal. Yeah, of course, lucky for us. One of the coolest features of Pluto that we've observed so far is the direct evidence of the erosion of Pluto's atmosphere. So Pluto has a tail, which anyone who knows Disney is not surprised by. Uh, it's on every single one of the cartoons. Go pun yourself until you're ashamed. So Pluto, Pluto does have an atmospheric tail, so that the soft the solar wind that that radiation, uh, it impacts the atmosphere. Pluto does not have super strong gravity. That atmosphere is getting stripped away and uh on the back side of the planet. You can sort of think of it. Imagine that you've got water that's hitting a round rock and you'd see the water kind of move around that rock and then rejoin on the other side. That rejoining part. Think of that as like the tail that's being pulled away from Pluto. That's where the solar wind has gone around Pluto and and started to strip this atmosphere away. Uh. That's why you have the various instruments aboard the new horizons to look for plasma and you know, indications of solar wind and also measure this this rate of the atmosphere being stripped from the planet. And it's pretty interesting. Um. Also, we're seeing some new pictures of Karen Nix and Hydra. The photo of Nicks shows like if you see the pictures of it, it's kind of this weird pink kind of like a j yeah, jelly beanish, Yeah, reddish, pinkish, kind of hue. Uh. But NASA does point out the color of those photos has been enhanced, and NIX looks exactly like it came out of the sequence where the Millennium falcon is going through the asteroid belt in the Empire Um. It looks like an asteroid from Star Wars, and Hydra itself may actually be covered in water ice, which is kind of exciting. Yeah, and yeah, we still have lots of things to to ask ourselves, like where is the heat coming from on Pluto? Yeah, I don't know. It's kind of cool. Yeah. In addition to the other hypotheses I mentioned earlier, I was again reading about this in this science magazine. So radioactive elements inside planets can of course explain heat coming up geologically, but that's thought not to be the case for Pluto and especially Karen, just because they're so small that they would have radioactive it did out already, if that's how you, Yeah, I had it all, I guess. So essentially their batteries would be drained by this point. Yeah, right, So of course it turns out that they're much younger than we we originally thought maybe that's the explanation. Yeah, it could be that's why we're looking so yeah, really interesting there. Um. One other thing to mention is the fact that we don't have all the information because New Horizons is still sending it to us. Yeah, and there's really quite a lot of it. We're going to spend the next several months, I think, receiving nitty gritty little bits of geological data. They kind of sent all of the big interest interesting photos out first to be like, hey, look at the shiny thing and be excited about it. And then it's going to be plodding through logs and logs and logs of data for a while, and it's not getting to us quickly for two very good reasons. So first of all, we probably won't be seeing the last of the Pluto data until maybe Scember. That'll be when we by then we should have received the last of it. Man speed of light, so slow at speed of light. And it's also the fact that they're using the equivalent of like a bond modem on the New Horizons, which is actually true. They they are, um, they're using a transmitter that has a throughput up between six hundred to twelve hundred bits per second. So if you're sending something of significant size, it's gonna take some time to get to Earth. Not just because of the distances involved, because yes, as we've said said, even light's going to be traveling, uh, you know, at a top speed where it's going to take hours to get back to Earth, but also because of the throughput. If a file is of a significant size, then you know, four and a half hours after it's been sent from the the probe, we start getting the first bits and then we have to wait several hours for it to complete. Uh, So this whole process is going to take quite some time. And uh, the the probe itself has a couple of different recorders on its solid state recorders, each of which has eight gigabytes of storage space available. And that might not sound like like a lot of of data. Eight eight gigs, you know, and these are modern times of having cell phones with a terabyte on them or whatever it is that people are walking around with these days. But but in terms of space exploration, it's it's really quite a lot, right, And when you factor in that you're only able to send it at six hundred to bits per second, that takes a very long time to send that much information, assuming that you've even filled up the drive. You may not have, but still it's going to take a long time. I mean that might not sink in because you might not even interact with the measure bit in your day to day life. Like a bit. What is a bit? Jonathan? Uh So, a bit is one eighth of a byte, and then so a gigabyte is a bill billion bites? Uh so eight billion bits? Um Well, roughly speaking, because if we want to be really really specific, then you have to start going like, oh, well, I kill a bite is actually one four But it doesn't We're not going to get into those those little tiny details. But yeah, generally speaking, you know, if you're talking about six bits per second, getting through a gigabytes gonna take you quite some time. Yeah. It just makes me think back to my early days of using a dial up modem and connecting to bulletin board systems. Um. I think it's said something along the lines that it would take you several hours to download a standard picture. Like uh like, if you were using your phone with the same sort of data throughput and you wanted to access a picture, you would start and then maybe like two hours later you might have a picture to look at. I remember doing that in like start a middle school. Yeah, okay, fine for Biddle school for you, Yeah okay, yeah, no, I remember when I was in like elementary school, right, elementary school, fantastic. You try to download a picture, might take an hour, but you know, then you'd print it on your printer and on your wall. My favorite was when you would start downloading a picture and someone would pick up the phone line and yeah, I needed this picture of Judas Priest that I'm not even going to be able to find that sailor Moon comic again. So the the other things we might learn due to the new horizons traveling around will be more information about some of the other moons of Pluto, as well as Kuiper Belt objects. They're supposed to. They're going to try and have the probe fly by some Kuiper Belt objects and get a better look at those to get an idea of the composition of those objects. And then, assuming the probe doesn't collide with anything or suffer any other kind of failures, it will continue space monsters, yeah, starn sandworms. Assuming none of that happens, it will just continue on its way and eventually enter interstellar space, following in the footsteps of Voyager one, which did that back in two thousand twelve, although we didn't get confirmation of until much later. So a voyager to still not in the interstellar space yet, So which is going to be the first one to reach Planet X. Oh, by the way, this has confirmed there is no planet X, unless it's like maybe what if what if Planet X is just on the opposite end of Pluto's orbit further out, Well, then New Horse wouldn't have any idea, right, you know, I actually have heard I think people say it's possible for there to be larger objects way out there somewhere in the Kuiper Belt where we can't see it because it doesn't radiate or reflect enough light for us to detect. And who knows, they might be right. It's just one of those things where you know, we have certainly been looking out there. But if it's because there so far away and they're they're they're large, but not like like large in the sense of Jupiter large. They're not large enough for it to to reflect enough light for us to detect easily. I don't see why that's impossible large and made vent of black. Yeah, it could be that they just absorbed light to the point where it's it's darker than what black is, you know, like that material developed here on Earth, but a mysus place. It is it is, and it's getting less mysterious as we send more missions out, like new horizons. So this was really a lot of fun to look into. I mean, it was great to see the excitement in the general population as the images started to come back and we got our first real close up look of Pluto. I know some people thought, oh, well, that's kind of sad. We've looked at all the planets now, like now we've got now we've got images of all the different planets. Where what's left. There's so much more left. Oh yeah, oh yeah. You can always send better cameras. You can always you can always send more instruments, you can always go further out, you can always land more stuff on weird stuff like comments. My goodness, people, we've got so many other things we can learn about. So and that's just within our solar system, let alone beyond it. So do not worry that we're running out of mystery. That is a ridiculous fear. It's a It is a a an enormous resource that we have only begun to sample, or just wallowing in it. Yeah. So hey, if you guys want to wallow in other stuff, preferably topics about the future, send us some comments and questions and suggestions we would love to hear from you. Send us your rant about planet X. Yeah, that's that, or you can send that to stuff they don't want you to know. But our email address is fw thinking at how Stuff Works dot com. You can also drop us a line on Twitter, Google Plus, or Facebook. At Twitter and Google Plus, we are FW thinking. Go to Facebook search fw thinking we'll pop up. You can leave us a message there. We do read all of them, and we look forward to talking to you again really soon. For more on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's go Places,