As an individual I’m excited that we have so much new information about Pluto from New Horizons. As an engineer, though, I’m wondering what we can do with it.
A Google Pluto or Google Maps-Pluto program that lets us fly around and explore the topography seems like an obvious first step. What happens after that, though? Does knowing about Pluto help us look for and understand exoplanets? Something else?
My understanding is that they found a mountain range which is suggesting that Pluto is geologically active and heated internally, and that this was surprising. I suppose that adds to our understanding of exoplanets.
New Horizons, Pluto — The new information is knowledge and understanding for its own sake. Some will say it’s a pointless squandering of resources. While others will say it’s the kind of thing that raises human kind a little above a mud skippper.
To me, this isn’t about Pluto. It is about the experiment and the experience of the mission and the knowledge gained from it. There is a wealth of information and data collected from this mission that can be used for new missions near by. And here, I’m not talking just about the “mission” knowledge, I’m also talking about all of the additional technological break through that was made to make this mission.
Studying Pluto like this is one way of getting detailed info about objects in the Kuiper belt, and the Kuiper belt is interesting because it is in a sense a failed giant planet – it’s believed that the solids there started accreting into a giant planet, and got far enough to make a few ~1000-km objects, but for some reason stopped before collecting into 1 or a few large bodies. We think the rest of the solar system probably also looked like a belt of bodies a few billion years ago, while the current giant planets were still forming, so the Kuiper belt is kind of a snapshot of the otherwise unobservable past. Learning more about the Kuiper belt should give us some clues as to how planet formation proceeded both in our solar system and in at least some exoplanet systems.
For example, the latest photos suggest there are very few craters on Pluto’s surface, in contrast to the surfaces of most other small bodies (asteroids and a few comets) that we’ve previously seen detailed photos of. Off the cuff, that could be because continuing sublimation/re-condensation of ices on Pluto’s surface is wiping out a lot of the craters. If so, perhaps we could learn something about Pluto’s internal composition/structure and constrain how it was formed. Or it could be because for some reason there are very few smaller meteoroid-sized objects flying around in Pluto’s vincinity, so impact craters form very rarely. That would be surprising – as far as we know, it would have been difficult, for example, to form Neptune within the age of the solar system if there were no small objects near it while it was forming – and would drive some rethinking of models of current Kuiper belt evolution as well as of many planet formation models. Or perhaps the explanation for the lack of craters is totally different – the point is, it’s evidence constraining some aspect of Pluto’s history or formation that we couldn’t get in any other way.