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20 April 2024 |
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Modeling Pluto's Minimum Pressure: Implications for Haze Production | | Perianne E. Johnson
; Leslie A. Young
; Silvia Protopapa
; Bernard Schmitt
; Leila R. Gabasova
; Briley L. Lewis
; John A. Stansberry
; Kathy E. Mandt
; Oliver L. White
; | | Date: |
24 Aug 2020 | | Abstract: | Pluto has a heterogeneous surface, despite a global haze deposition rate of
~1 micrometer per orbit (Cheng et al., 2017; Grundy et al., 2018). While there
could be spatial variation in the deposition rate, this has not yet been
rigorously quantified, and naively the haze should coat the surface more
uniformly than was observed. One way (among many) to explain this contradiction
is for atmospheric pressure at the surface to drop low enough to interrupt haze
production and stop the deposition of particles onto part of the surface,
driving heterogeneity. If the surface pressure drops to less than 10^-3 - 10^-4
microbar and the CH4 mixing ratio remains nearly constant at the observed 2015
value, the atmosphere becomes transparent to ultraviolet radiation (Young et
al., 2018), which would shut off haze production at its source. If the surface
pressure falls below 0.06 microbar, the atmosphere ceases to be global, and
instead is localized over only the warmest part of the surface, restricting the
location of deposition (Spencer et al., 1997). In Pluto’s current atmosphere,
haze monomers collect together into aggregate particles at beginning at 0.5
microbar; if the surface pressure falls below this limit, the appearance of
particles deposited at different times of year and in different locations could
be different. We use VT3D, an energy balance model (Young, 2017), to model the
surface pressure on Pluto in current and past orbital configurations for four
possible static N2 ice distributions: the observed northern hemisphere
distribution with (1) a bare southern hemisphere, (2) a south polar cap, (3) a
southern zonal band, and finally (4) a distribution that is bare everywhere
except inside the boundary of Sputnik Planitia. We also present a sensitivity
study showing the effect of mobile N2 ice...(cont.) | | Source: | arXiv, 2008.10716 | | Services: | Forum | Review | PDF | Favorites | |
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