Pluto As Seen by the LEISA Spectrometer on New Horizons

Abstract:

After its 3463-day journey, the New Horizons spacecraft flew by the Pluto-Charon system at ~12,000 km from Pluto's surface on 14 July 2015. Images from the New Horizons spacecraft reveal an icy surface with terrains of widely different ages and a significant degree of localized coloration. Pluto was observed at high spatial resolution (~6 km/px) by the LEISA imaging spectrometer. LEISA is a component of the Ralph instrument (Reuter, D.C., Stern, S.A., Scherrer, J., et al. 2008, Space Sci. Rev. 140, 129) and affords a spectral resolving power of 240 in the wavelength range 1.25-2.5 µm, and 560 in the range 2.1-2.25 µm. Spatially resolved spectra with LEISA are used to map the distributions of the known ices on Pluto (N₂, CH₄, CO, C₂H₆) and to search for other surface components. We present results obtained from the analysis of the high spatial resolution dataset obtained close to flyby.