Short notice here but in a half an hour from now (15h00-CST) there will be a presentation from Alan Stern about New Horizons at the Small Bodies Assessment Group 2016 meeting. Not sure if there will be a published recording of the event afterward. If there is, I will post it here as well.

Agenda (pdf)

Live video feed

The presentation from yesterday can be watched at this link. Not a lot to update from the presentation. There was a better water distribution map presented that I hadn't yet seen myself and also a red-blue 3D version of PIA19955. Also, as Emily posted in the other thread, they have another informal name they are using for 2014MU69 - JimGreen, after Jim Green, Director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA, who apparently hasn't yet initiated a naming contest for the KBO as requested.

Screen capture of water ice from Stern's presentation
Click to view attachment
Stern noted that despite its broad extent there is no mention in the literature of its detection from ground based telescopes.

Water ice on Pluto:

http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/pluto-s-...pread-water-ice

It's interesting how an otherwise unassuming and seemingly random spot shows up dramatically in the water-ice imagery:

Click to view attachment

One possibility that comes to mind is a warm spot free of more volatile ices, but I'd think that would show up in the visible-light image.

It seems like there's a few things that it may correspond to in that image. For example, there appears to be more water in surfaces covered with the reddish material, so temperature might be a factor. It also looks like there's a higher concentration in the area with chained pits, so it might be a surface unit more rich in water ice. Finally, one of the spots is associated with a couple(?) of fresh craters(?), so it might also be deeper material blasted out that hasn't had time to accumulate a coating of more volatile ices.

I wonder why the eastern parts of Cthulhu Regio have less than other parts? Older terrain->more tholins? Circulation patterns? Elevation?

MOD NOTE: We're gonna start a third Pluto Surface Observations thread this weekend in order to keep these sections at a manageable and searchable size. A notice will be posted here with a link to the new thread when that happens. Thanks!


EDIT: New thread now live for observations received after 1 Feb 2016.

sorry if this is nacroposting, i reprojected the thing, and compared it to the charonshine (Click Here for article)
below is the charonshine from the article


and here is a reprojection of that charonshine extraction attempt (i inverted it back, the thing looked like it was inverted in the original, i also did some enhancements)
(offset is correct too)
Click to view attachment

and most of the stuff lines up, idk if its just me or there may be some topography visible outside of the range of the charonshine (streaks in map is just artifacts)
i am not saying it is 100% charonshine, i just did a little comparison, and the stuff lines up nicely, so yeah you have some night-side terrains (illuminated by atmosphere shine, a bit of it could be charonshine)