New Horizons Upper Limits on O${}_2$ in Pluto's Present Day Atmosphere

Abstract

The surprising discovery by the Rosetta spacecraft of molecular oxygen (O${}_2$) in the coma of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (Bieler et al. 2015) challenged our understanding of the inventory of this volatile species on and inside bodies from the Kuiper Belt. That discovery motivated our search for oxygen in the atmosphere of Kuiper Belt planet Pluto, because O${}_2$ is volatile even at Pluto's surface temperatures. During the New Horizons flyby of Pluto in July 2015, the spacecraft probed the composition of Pluto's atmosphere using a variety of observations, including an ultraviolet solar occultation observed by the Alice UV spectrograph (Stern et al. 2015; Gladstone et al. 2016; Young et al. 2017). As described in these reports, absorption by molecular species in Pluto's atmosphere yielded detections of N${}_2$, as well as hydrocarbon species such as CH${}_4$, C${}_2$H${}_2$, C${}_2$H${}_4$, and C${}_2$H${}_6$. Our work here further examines this data to search for UV absorption from molecular oxygen (O${}_2$), which has a signicant cross section in the Alice spectrograph bandpass. We find no evidence for O${}_2$ absorption, and place an upper limit on the total amount of O${}_2$ in Pluto's atmosphere as a function of tangent height up to 700 km. In most of the atmosphere this upper limit in line of sight abundance units is ~3x10${}^{15}$ cm${}^{-2}$, which depending on tangent height corresponds to a mixing ratio of 10${}^{-6}$ to 10${}^{-4}$, far lower than in comet 67P/CG.

arXiv comment5 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, The Astronomical Journal, 2017, in press

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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Structure and Composition of Pluto's atmosphere from the New Horizons Solar Ultraviolet Occultation
• The Pluto System After New Horizons
• Primordial N2 provides a cosmochemical explanation for the existence of Sputnik Planitia, Pluto