Haze in Pluto's atmosphere: Results from SOFIA and ground-based observations of the 2015 June 29 Pluto occultation
Abstract
We observed the 29 June 2015 occultation by Pluto from SOFIA and several ground-based sites in New Zealand. Pre-event astrometry (described in Zuluaga et al., this conference) allowed us to navigate SOFIA into Pluto's central flash (Person et al., this conference). Fortuitously, the central flash also fell over the Mt. John University Observatory (Pasachoff et al., this conference). We combine all of our airborne and ground-based data to produce a geometric solution for the occultation and to investigate the state of Pluto's atmosphere just two weeks before the New Horizons spacecraft's close encounter with Pluto. We find that the atmosphere parameters at half-light are unchanged from our observations in 2011 (Person et al. 2013) and 2013 (Bosh et al. 2015). By combining our light-curve inversion with recent radius measurements from New Horizons, we find strong evidence for an extended haze layer in Pluto's atmosphere. See also Sickafoose et al. (this conference) for an evaluation of the particle sizes and properties.SOFIA is jointly operated by the Universities Space Research Association, Inc. (USRA), under NASA contract NAS2-97001, and the Deutsches SOFIA Institut (DSI) under DLR contract 50 OK 0901 to the University of Stuttgart. Support for this work was provided by NASA SSO grants NNX15AJ82G (Lowell Observatory), NNX10AB27G (MIT), and NNX12AJ29G (Williams College), and by the National Research Foundation of South Africa.
- Publication:
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AAS/Division for Planetary Sciences Meeting Abstracts #47
- Pub Date:
- November 2015
- Bibcode:
- 2015DPS....4710503B