Pluto's "Thick" Air Isn't Going Anywhere

astroengine writes "When the proposition for NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto was put forward, there was an air of urgency. The dwarf planet is moving away from the Sun in its eccentric orbit, so astronomers were concerned that the Plutonian atmosphere would freeze out and collapse onto the surface as fresh nitrogen-methane snow before they could get a spacecraft out there to observe it. But according to new research [arXiv], it appears there's little risk of a Pluto air freeze-out. From recent occultation measurements, it appears the atmosphere is becoming denser and more buoyant, meaning it will remain as an atmosphere all (Pluto) year 'round — 248 Earth years long."

Comments

Can you imagine living on Pluto?

[ArcadeMan]

(Refresh fedex.com web page)
Oh man, my package has been rescheduled to arrive "tomorrow".

Re:Can you imagine living on Pluto?

[Anonymous Coward]

Delivery Service no longer extended to dwarf planets, package will be available for pickup for the next 5 business days at the nearest FedEx location (Mercury)

Re:Can you imagine living on Pluto?

[beatljuice]

A week late isn't too bad. (Pluto takes 6. 39 Earth days to rotate on its axis.)

Re:Can you imagine living on Pluto?

[icebike]

Exactly!

There’s no point acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and discontinuance notices have been on display in your local planning
department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start
making a fuss about it now.

Re:Can you imagine living on Pluto?

[icebike]

But most prison sentences are given in months, and months are based on the Moon's orbit around its (dwarf) Planet, and Charon orbits Pluto every 6.387230 days. So that would be a blessing, no?

snow on a dwarf planet

[Covalent]

It will be interesting to see if DH spots any snow...so far as I know we haven't spotted active snowing on any body other than Earth.

Denser will make landing easier

[Herve5]

With a denser atmosphere (rather than none), it'll become easier indeed to brake and land.
When for instance you compare atmospheric entry and landing within the Earth atmosphere and the Martian one, the main difficulty on Mars is the much less dense atmosphere: aerobraking, transonic parachute deployment, end-of-trajectory thrusters all happen in a matter of dozens of seconds on Mars, while on Earth you have many minutes at least.

The denser atmosphere the best for safe arrival ;-)

(and that explains, too, the many crashes on Mars)

I participated in the Titan landing for Cassini/Huygens : I clearly remember the Titan atmosphere as a "thick" one, like on Earth (now we had other issues at the time, among others the terrible uncertainty on gas composition itself).
But I'm close to consider landing on Mars, though, is harder than on Titan.

How exactly will it be on Pluto, I hope to see ;-)