Research articles

search articles

My Pages

Stat

Members: 3645
Articles: 2'504'928
Articles rated: 2609

26 April 2024

» arxiv » 1608.6955

Article overview

New Horizons Constraints on Charon's Present Day Atmosphere
S. A. Stern ; J. A. Kammer ; G. R. Gladstone ; A. J. Steffl ; A. F. Cheng ; L. A. Young ; H. A. Weaver ; C. B. Olkin ; K. Ennico ; J. W. Parker ; A. H. Parker ; T. R. Lauer ; A. Zangari ; M. Summers ; New Horizons Atmospheres Team ;
Date:	24 Aug 2016
Abstract:	We report on a variety of standard techniques used by New Horizons including a solar ultraviolet occultation, ultraviolet airglow observations, and high-phase look-back particulate search imaging to search for an atmosphere around Pluto’s large moon Charon during its flyby in July 2015. Analyzing these datasets, no evidence for a present day atmosphere has been found for 14 potential atomic and molecular species, all of which are now constrained to have pressures below 0.3 nanobar, as we describe below, these are much more stringent upper limits than the previously available 15-110 nanobar constraints (e.g., Sicardy et al. 2006); for example, we find a 3$sigma$ upper limit for an N$_2$ atmosphere on Charon is 4.2 picobars and a 3$sigma$ upper limit for the brightness of any atmospheric haze on Charon of I/F=2.6x10$^{-5}$. A radio occultation search for an atmosphere around Charon was also conducted by New Horizons but will be published separately by other authors.
Source:	arXiv, 1608.6955
Services:	Forum \| Review \| PDF \| Favorites

No review found.

Did you like this article?

This article or document is ...
important:
of broad interest:
readable:
new:
correct:
Global appreciation:

Note: answers to reviews or questions about the article must be posted in the forum section.
Authors are not allowed to review their own article. They can use the forum section.

browser Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)

ScienXe.org
» my Online CV
» Free

News, job offers and information for researchers and scientists:

home

contact

sitemap