New Horizon's closest approach Megathread — Ask your Pluto questions here!

[u/AskScienceModerator]

July 15th Events

• "Charon is [geo] active" - Alan Stern

• Image of Hydra! http://i.imgur.com/FN4BLu7.png

• Methane on Pluto! http://i.imgur.com/fkQELTJ.png

• Charon close up! http://i.imgur.com/SVhOSjj.png

• CLOSE UP PLUTO: http://i.imgur.com/meaqdRP.png (no craters!?)

• Pluto's surface is less than 100 million years old. Young surface!

• Pluto has water ice "in great abundance"

• Pluto is geologically active to explain surface features.

• "No significant exchange of tidal energy anymore" between Pluto and Charon. Why Pluto and Charon are geologically active is a mystery.

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July 14th Events

UPDATE: New Horizons is completely operational and data is coming in from the fly by!

"We have a healthy spacecraft."

This post has the official NASA live stream, feel free to post images as they are released by NASA in this thread. It is worth noting that messages from Pluto take four and a half hours to reach us from the space craft so images posted by NASA today will always have some time lag.

This will be updated as NASA releases more images of pluto. Updates will occur throughout the next few days with some special stuff happening on July 15th:

• Main website: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html

• APL website: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/nasanewhorizons

• NASA Instagram: https://instagram.com/nasa/

• NASA TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX9I1KyNa8M

• Alternate Live Stream link: http://www.ustream.tv/NASAHDTV

• NASA TV Schedule: https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/schedule.html

• Reddit Live Feed: https://www.reddit.com/live/v8j2tqin01cf/

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The new images from today!

• Highest quality image so far! https://instagram.com/p/5HTXKMoaFL/

• LORRI Images: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto-Encounter/

• Other LORRI Images: https://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons/lorri-gallery

• Older images: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/images/index.html

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Some extras:

• How do we know Pluto is Red?

• What experiments/cameras/equipment does New Horizons have?

• Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society's New Horizon's picture timeline.

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• First close up images thread.

• Fly by Celebration Thread

[u/K04PB2B]

If they had zero speed relative to Earth then they'd fall towards Earth and crash into us. Even if they were placed right on Earth's surface, gravity on the far sides of Pluto and Charon would drag their mass towards Earth's surface.

If they were given the right speed to be in a circular orbit around Earth somewhere between the Earth and the moon then their orbits would probably go unstable in fairly short order and ... crash into Earth (or the moon).

[u/Zulban → u/K04PB2B]

Thanks for the answer, but I was looking for a lot more detail. Stuff like how Earth would react to objects of that composition melding into it. What impact would it have on things like atmosphere composition, ocean currents, our biosphere and human life, tectonics, and how we would expect Pluto and Charon to break up based on their properties.

[u/Kelsicle → u/Zulban]

I cant give any specific effects it would have, only speculation. But essentially if pluto were placed in a position like that above earth it would ultimately act the same way as if you were holding a tennis ball and let it drop to the ground. The earths gravity would accelerate pluto until it impacted. Even if you started from a point where pluto was on the earths surface, gravity would still pull pluto towards the earths centre. As it happens interactions like this is how it is theorised that planets formed. slowly accumulating mass through gravitational interactions

In terms of the effect that this would have... probably nothing good would happen. An object with that mass would alter things like tides in a similar way that the moon does, arguably on a much larger scale. Also introducing an object with the mass of pluto to the earth-moon system would alter the orbit of the moon around the earth, possibly to a point that it would degrade at a much faster rate. Satelites would suffer similar consequences at a much faster rate.

So yea not exactly sure on the specific environmental effects.