Related papers: The Pluto system: Initial results from its explora…
One of the many exciting revelations of the New Horizons flyby of Pluto was the observation of global haze layers at altitudes as high as 200 km in the visible wavelengths. This haze is produced in the upper atmosphere through photochemical…
Thermal observations of the Pluto-Charon system acquired by the Herschel Space Observatory in February 2012 are presented. They consist of photometric measurements with the PACS and SPIRE instruments (nine visits to the Pluto system each),…
Simple theoretical calculations have suggested that small body impacts onto Pluto's newly discovered small satellites, Nix and Hydra, are capable of generating time-variable rings or dust sheets in the Pluto system. Using HST/ACS data…
Observations of Pluto and its solar-tidal stability zone were made using the Advanced Camera for Surveys' (ACS) Wide Field Channel (WFC) on the Hubble Space Telescope on UT 2005 May 15 and UT 2005 May 18. Two small satellites of Pluto,…
Systematic geomorphological mapping and detailed landform analysis using the highest resolution images obtained by the New Horizons spacecraft reveal the presence of a range of differentiable terrains on Charon, the largest moon of Pluto,…
The flyby of Pluto and Charon by the New Horizons spacecraft provided high-resolution images of cratered surfaces embedded in the Kuiper belt, an extensive region of bodies orbiting beyond Neptune. Impact craters on Pluto and Charon were…
The New Horizons mission was launched on 2006 January 19, and the spacecraft is heading for a flyby encounter with the Pluto system in the summer of 2015. The challenges associated with sending a spacecraft to Pluto in less than 10 years…
The search for habitable planets like Earth around other stars fulfils an ancient imperative to understand our origins and place in the cosmos. The past decade has seen the discovery of hundreds of planets, but nearly all are gas giants…
This brief review will discuss the current knowledge on the origin and evolution of the nitrogen atmospheres of the icy bodies in the solar system, particularly of Titan, Triton and Pluto. An important tool to analyse and understand the…
Since 2013, observations of Neptune with small telescopes have resulted in several detections of long-lived bright atmospheric features that have also been observed by large telescopes such as Keck II or Hubble. The combination of both…
The recent discovery of two large trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) 2003 UB313 and 2005 FY9, with surface properties similar to those of Pluto, provides an exciting new laboratory for the study of processes considered for Pluto and Triton:…
Titan is the only moon with a substantial atmosphere, the only other thick N$_{2}$ atmosphere besides Earth's, the site of extraordinarily complex atmospheric chemistry that far surpasses any other solar system atmosphere, and the only…
Clouds and hazes are abundant in the thin and cold atmospheres of Triton and Pluto, where they are thought to be produced by interactions between atmospheric gases and ultraviolet photons from the Sun and those scattered by the local…
The goal is to determine the composition of Pluto's atmosphere and to constrain the nature of surface-atmosphere interactions. We perform high--resolution spectroscopic observations in the 2.33--2.36 $\mu$m range, using CRIRES at the VLT.…
In this letter we explore the environment of Pluto and Charon in the far infrared with the main aim to identify the signs of any possible dust ring, should it exist in the system. Our study is based on observations performed at 70 um with…
Triton possesses a thin atmosphere, primarily composed of nitrogen, sustained by the sublimation of surface ices. The goal is to determine the composition of Triton's atmosphere and to constrain the nature of surface-atmosphere…
We present three near-infrared spectra of Pluto taken with the IRTF and SpeX, an optical spectrum of Triton taken with the MMT and the Red Channel Spectrograph, and previously published spectra of Pluto, Triton, and Eris. We combine these…
We present new astrometry of Pluto's three satellites from images taken of the Pluto system during 2002-3 with the High Resolution Camera (HRC) mode of the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope. The…
The deep nitrogen-covered Sputnik Planitia (SP; informal name) basin on Pluto is located very close to the longitude of Pluto's tidal axis[1] and may be an impact feature [2], by analogy with other large basins in the solar system[3,4].…
The Pluto system provides a unique local laboratory for the study of binaries with multiple low mass companions. In this paper, we study the orbital stability of P4, the most recently discovered moon in the Pluto system. This newfound…