Other
Scientific paper
Jan 1994
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1994phdt........30s&link_type=abstract
PhD Dissertation, Arizona Univ. Tucson, AZ United States
Other
Atmospheric Composition, Convective Heat Transfer, Ice, Pluto (Planet), Pluto Atmosphere, Sublimation, Triton, Satellite Atmospheres, Planetary Temperature, Air Land Interactions, Albedo, Emissivity, Nitrogen, Polar Caps, Atmospheric Temperature, Mathematical Models, Land Surface Temperature
Scientific paper
Sublimation of volatile ices and convection play important roles in determining the present and past climates of Neptune's large moon, Triton, and Pluto. The author has developed models of these two processes and used the distribution of albedo on the surfaces of these two bodies to study surface temperatures, distribution of volatile ices, and lower atmospheric structure. Initial studies focused on Triton, which was encountered by Voyager 2 in 1989. One of the surprising results is that Triton's South Polar Cap is considerably larger than predicted by the model. Another basic result is that the volatile N2 ice on Triton's surface has a low thermal emissivity (approximately equal to 0.7) relative to canonical emissivity values, which are near unity. Some ambiguity in the thermal structure of Triton's atmosphere resulted from the encounter. By modeling the convective transport of heat between the surface and atmosphere it is shown that the near-surface atmospheric temperature was close to the low end of the expected range; previous analyses of the occultation of a star by Pluto in 1988 may have erroneously concluded that Pluto's radius is approximately 1200 km. The current results, while not ruling out that conclusion, show that Pluto could be much smaller than 1200 km and the atmosphere could still have produced the observed occultation lightcurve. A smaller surface radius, combined with the occultation lightcurve, implies that Pluto possesses a troposphere, which has never been considered before. The remaining piece of the Pluto atmosphere puzzle is the somewhat anomalous atmospheric composition required to explain the temperature structure derived from the occultation results. By expanding earlier Triton work on the distribution of N2 ice to include the physics of simultaneous sublimation of N2 and CH4, the required 'anomalous' atmospheric composition is shown to be totally reasonable. Synthesizing these results with other recent work, a new and testable paradigm for Pluto's atmosphere is proposed.
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