P51A-2048
Ground-based Light Curves Two Pluto Days Before the New Horizons Passage
Friday, 18 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Jay M Pasachoff1,2, Bryce A Babcock1, Rebecca F Durst1, Christina H Seeger1, Stephen E Levine3, Fumio Abe4, Daisuke Suzuki5, Masayuki Nagakane6, Amanda S. Bosh3,7, Amanda A Sickafoose7,8, Michael J Person7, Carlos Zuluaga7 and Molly R Kosiarek7, (1)Williams College, Williamstown, MA, United States, (2)California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, United States, (3)Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, AZ, United States, (4)Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan, (5)University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, United States, (6)Osaka University, Osaka, Japan, (7)Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States, (8)South African Astronomical Observatory, Cape Town, South Africa
Abstract:
We observed the occultation of a 12th magnitude star, one of the two brightest occultation stars ever in our dozen years of continual monitoring of Pluto's atmosphere through such studies, on 29 June 2015 UTC. At Canterbury University's Mt. John University Observatory on the south island of New Zealand, in clear sky, we used our POETS frame-transfer CCD at 10 Hz with GPS timing on the 1-m McLellan telescope as well as an infrared camera on an 0.6-m telescope and three-color photometry at a slower cadence on a second 0.6-m telescope. The light curves show a central flash, indicating that we were close to the center of the occultation path, and allowing us to explore Pluto's atmosphere lower than usual. The light curves show that Pluto's atmosphere remained robust. Observations from 0.5- and 0.4-m telescopes at the Auckland Observatory gave the first half of the occultation before clouds came in. We coordinated our observations with aircraft observations with NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) and its High Speed Imaging Photometer for Occultations (HIPO). Our ground-based and airborne stellar-occultation effort came only just over two weeks of Earth days and two Pluto days (based on Pluto's rotational period) before the flyby of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, meaning that the mission's exquisite snapshot of Pluto's atmosphere can be placed in the context of our series of ground-based occultation observations carried out on a regular basis since 2002 following a first Pluto occultation observed in 1988 from aloft. Our observations were supported by NASA Planetary Astronomy grants NNX12AJ29G to Williams College, NNX15AJ82G to Lowell Observatory, and NNX10AB27G to MIT, and by the National Research Foundation of South Africa. We thank Alan Gilmore, Pam Kilmartin, Robert Lucas, Paul Tristam, and Carolle Varughese for assistance at Mt. John.
