QUESTION: 
Have you ever studied Pluto from the KAO?  
If so, when?  Did you make any discoveries?


ANSWER:
Sorry this question has taken so long to answer but my response was
delayed due to a short term, heavy work load for the STARDUST
mission. [This is a mission to go to a comet, collect a sample, and
return it to Earth for study. If you want to learn more about it you can
find it on the Web at  http://pdc.jpl.nasa.gov/stardust/home.html].

I personally have never used the KAO to study Pluto. I have, however,
studied Pluto in other ways. Other astronomers in my organization work
hard to obtain infrared spectra of Pluto and Neptune's moon Triton using
ground-based telescopes. [Spectroscopy is basically a technique where you
very carefully measure the 'colors' of a object. In this case the 'colors'
being measured are in the infrared and invisible to our eyes. It turns out
that the infrared colors of a object can tell you a lot about what kinds of
atoms and molecules the object contains.]  My colleagues discovered that
Pluto and Triton have similar spectra in the infrared and these spectra
contained absorption features (essentially missing colors!) that could tell us
about what kinds of materials are on the surfaces of these objects.

I work in a laboratory where we have sophisticated equipment that helps us
measure the spectra of various materials under the pressure and
temperature conditions on Pluto and Triton (very low pressure - almost a
vacuum; very low temperature - around -400oF!).  The spectra we measure
in the laboratory can then be compared to the spectra of Pluto and Triton
and we can use and similarities and differences we find to tell us about
what's on the surfaces of these objects.  By making such comparisons it
has been determined that both of these objects have a lot of methane (CH4)
and nitrogen (N2) on their surfaces in the form of ice.  They also contain
smaller amounts of carbon monoxide (CO) and carbon dioxide (CO2) ices
and quite possibly very small amounts of organic hydrocarbons.

All of these molecules are present on Earth, but here they are found as
gases in the atmosphere.  On Pluto and Triton it is so cold that these
materials condense and freeze solid.  If you moved the Earth out to the
distance of Pluto our atmosphere would freeze out too!  Then we'd have
nothing to breath (but the skiiing would be interesting!).