Orbits of Pluto's Satellites

Details Orbits of Pluto's Satellites Orbits of Pluto's Satellites

Sep 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006dps....38.2501b&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #38, #25.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 38, p.523

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

1

Scientific paper

In 2005 two new small satellites of Pluto were discovered. These new bodies are still poorly characterized but their mere existence is sufficient to use them to probe the current dynamical state of the Pluto system as well as provide constraints on its past history. Numerous efforts in the past were made to measure the relative masses of Pluto and Charon. Without the new satellites this is a difficult task. Since the new satellites are very small compared to Pluto and Charon their orbital motion is about the center of mass and it becomes easy to directly constrain the Charon/Pluto mass ratio. We will present a review of the available astrometric information for the Pluto system that has been collected by the Hubble Space Telescope and discuss current orbits and progress on improvements. Though the current orbits are good we will be adding constraints from additional archival data, including pre-COSTAR WFPC images from 1992/3 that will significantly increase the timebase of the astrometry. We note that fitting the high-quality HST observations requires removing the astrometric contamination caused by albedo and lightcurve effects and our approach to do this will be discussed. We will also review the processing strategy required to analyze the positional data and reveal the true orbital motion particularly with an eye toward investigating perturbed motion. Measuring the perturbations will lead to additional constraints on the masses of the new satellites, Hydra and Nix. Finally, implications of these new objects and the improved orbits for all satellites will be discussed in the context of a re-examination of the mutual event data from the late 1980's. This work is being supported by grants from the Space Telescope Science Institute.

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