Astronomers get their first picture of the dark side of Pluto

 

Scientists have reconstructed the image of Pluto’s dark side in the light of Charon.
An article about this was published in the Planetary Science Journal.

New Horizons is the only spacecraft to explore Pluto at close range for 2021 The probe’s journey past this dwarf planet took only a few hours, while the orbital period of Pluto on its axis is just over 6 days. Therefore, at the moment, scientists do not have high-quality images of the side that then turned from the Sun, they are trying to obtain them by indirect methods.

Todd Lauer of the US center NOIRLab and colleagues have been able to reconstruct a picture of Pluto’s dark side. In this they were helped by the reflected light of Charon – a satellite of the dwarf planet, orbiting at a distance of about 19 thousand kilometers.
Due to the long exposure, sunlight spoiled the picture, it was distorted by the movement of the device, and the atmosphere of Pluto turned out to be in the form of a bright halo.

The LORRI camera of this device does not have a shutter, so the shutter speed is the time between taking readings from the CCD sensor. These readings can be taken and processed using various algorithms, in this case, the scientists manually processed a large set of raw (raw) data to recreate the correct image.

As a result, the researchers obtained a relatively high-quality image of the dark side of Pluto, which shows a region of high albedo in the Southern Hemisphere. Scientists suggest that there are deposits of nitrogen and methane ice. The south pole of the dwarf planet has a small albedo, and the authors of the work believe that this is caused either by summer sublimation of ice, or the deposition of solid particles from atmospheric fog.