Tom writes, "Scientists at Northern Arizona U. use a home-made machine to create 'exotic ices.' They're simulating the surface of Pluto to help explain data and pictures sent to Earth by the New Horizons spacecraft."
MIT planetary science grad student Alissa Earle is using New Horizons and ice-lab data to study the boundaries of Pluto's now-famous "heart" feature. The outskirts of the heart show signs of pitted ice and also of warmer ice rising to the surface, like blobs in a lava lamp. "This is just one of the regions where results from the NAU ice lab can really help us better understand what is going on… The work done in the lab helps us better understand how these substances behave at Pluto temperatures and pressures, which in turn helps us understand what we are seeing in the images being sent back by New Horizons."
And there's plenty yet to understand, says Lowell astronomer Will Grundy, who as co-investigator of NASA's New Horizons team had input into designing the mission. Scientists have known the nature of Pluto's composition for decades, but New Horizons showed how the stuff on the little world's surface interacts to build mountains and dig valleys. "[It's] wild speculation until you see it laid out on a scale of tens of kilometers," Grundy says.
Cold Science
[Tom Marcinko/Phoenix Magazine]
