The Detailed Vertical Structure of Pluto's Atmosphere from the 12 Jun 2006 Stellar Occultation.

Details The Detailed Vertical Structure of Pluto's Atmosphere from the 12 Jun 2006 Stellar Occultation. The Detailed Vertical Structure of Pluto's Atmosphere from the 12 Jun 2006 Stellar Occultation.

Sep 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006dps....38.3104y&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #38, #31.04; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 38, p.541

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

On 12 JUN 2006 Pluto passed in front of a 15th magnitude star, casting a shadow across southern latitudes that included southern Australia and New Zealand, where we deployed 4 teams of observers. Pluto stellar occultations provide an opportunity to derive the bulk column abundance and the pressure, density and temperature profiles. Previous occultations were observed in 1988 and 2002 (2).
We obtained a high-quality lightcurve from the 4-m AAT at a frame rate of 5 Hz, corresponding to 15 samples per scale height with a S/N of at least 25 per sample. The lightcurve contains numerous spikes that are the result of local perturbations in the vertical index of refraction profile; we resolve most of these spikes into five or more points. We expect to present changes to Pluto's bulk column abundance in the context of 1988 and 2002 events (i.e., is Pluto's atmosphere continuing to increase?) as well as high-resolution structure that derives from the detailed shape, spikes and wiggles from the separate ingress and egress portions of the occultation lightcurve.
This work is supported by grants from the NSF's Major Research Instrumentation program and NASA's Planetary Astronomy program.

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