digilib@itb.ac.id +62 812 2508 8800

2017_EJRNL_PP_ROBERT_A__WEST_1.pdf
Terbatas pustaka bosscha
» ITB

In 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft captured the first close-up images of Pluto and its moons (http://pluto.jhuapl.edu). It is hard to imagine how anyone who has seen these images could not be both impressed by the achievement and excited by what the images and other data reveal. One of the big surprises1 was that Pluto’s atmosphere is much colder than predicted2 at altitudes above 50 kilometres. Because temperature profiles are fundamental to understanding the physics of planetary atmospheres, scientists have been compelled to determine whether key atmospheric processes were missed in earlier studies. On page 352, Zhang et al.3 come to the remarkable conclusion that haze particles, rather than gas molecules, control Pluto’s atmospheric temperature.