10-04-2015, 09:03 PM
HOTPE,
"I haven't paid a lot of attention to what New Horizons has discovered about Pluto's geologic composition, but perhaps the lack of color is due to the planet/dwarf planet/Kuiper Belt object consisting of a moon-like (earth moon) material? Or a frozen ice-like coating? It is after all, the Antarctica of the solar system, and much of that continent is colorless, except for the flags and parkas"
My apologies, I should have responded to your post much earlier; for some reason I missed it.
The lack of color is simply due to the difficulties of transmitting those data from so far away. However, your point is interesting on its own. Our eyes are tuned to visible sunlight and their filter is quite large, i.e., if something is bright at a very specific and precise wavelength, our eyes can't discern that, that light just gets added to the whole visible spectrum we see all at once.
However, if you take images through various filters, then things look quite different. Now, I haven't checked what filters New Horizons has (I'll fix that shortly), but if, for example, they used some three-micron filters (infrared), then emission from large molecules can be seen. These molecules are often formed after being subjected to UV radiation or, here, on Earth, BBQs. The brown stuff at the poles of both Pluto and Charon has me interested, because they may indicate that kind of processing, but since I don't know what filters were used (yet), I can't tell for certain if this is a blind alley or real UV-processing on the poles. But if that's the case, why is the processing only occurring there and what created such a new surface on much of Pluto?
Apologies, just thinking out loud, lots of mysteries to solve...
"I haven't paid a lot of attention to what New Horizons has discovered about Pluto's geologic composition, but perhaps the lack of color is due to the planet/dwarf planet/Kuiper Belt object consisting of a moon-like (earth moon) material? Or a frozen ice-like coating? It is after all, the Antarctica of the solar system, and much of that continent is colorless, except for the flags and parkas"
My apologies, I should have responded to your post much earlier; for some reason I missed it.
The lack of color is simply due to the difficulties of transmitting those data from so far away. However, your point is interesting on its own. Our eyes are tuned to visible sunlight and their filter is quite large, i.e., if something is bright at a very specific and precise wavelength, our eyes can't discern that, that light just gets added to the whole visible spectrum we see all at once.
However, if you take images through various filters, then things look quite different. Now, I haven't checked what filters New Horizons has (I'll fix that shortly), but if, for example, they used some three-micron filters (infrared), then emission from large molecules can be seen. These molecules are often formed after being subjected to UV radiation or, here, on Earth, BBQs. The brown stuff at the poles of both Pluto and Charon has me interested, because they may indicate that kind of processing, but since I don't know what filters were used (yet), I can't tell for certain if this is a blind alley or real UV-processing on the poles. But if that's the case, why is the processing only occurring there and what created such a new surface on much of Pluto?
Apologies, just thinking out loud, lots of mysteries to solve...