York space engineering Professor Jinjun Shan will be heading to Alice Springs, Australia in April to deploy a modified 2-D Fabry-Pérot Spectrometer on a stratospheric balloon flight mission. The mission is the second for Shan.

Last fall, Shan and his team achieved a global first when they successfully flew their 2-D Fabry-Pérot Spectrometer on a stratospheric balloon during a 10-hour mission that saw the balloon and its scientific payload reach an altitude of 34 kilometres. The flight took place in Kiruna, Sweden, lifting Shan’s 2-D imaging Fabry-Pérot spectrometer aloft. The spectrometer, which was jointly developed by Shan’s team at YorkUniversity and MPB Communications Inc., was created to obtain very high spectral resolution measurements. In essence, it views sunlight that is absorbed and scattered by the atmosphere and reflected by the Earth’s surface.

“The measurements provide information on aerosols, surface pressure and surface albedo,” said Shan, who is Professor of Space Engineering in the Department of Earth and Space Science and Engineering (ESSE) in the Lassonde School of Engineering at York University. Shan is the principal investigator of the project, which is funded by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), under its Flights for the Advancement of Science & Technology (FAST) program in 2014.

Professor Gordon Shepherd and Chris Sioris (PhD ’01) also from ESSE, are co-investigators on the project. Also contributing to the project development of instrumentation are a number of science and engineering researchers, including ESSE students.

For its first flight, Shan said the stratospheric balloon took off few minutes before 7am local time (about 1am EDT) on Saturday, Sept. 3at the Esrange Space Center, near Kiruna, Sweden. It landed around 2:15pm in Northern Finland, and the instrument was successfully recovered before 8pm. “The success of the flight was a first,” said a jubilant Shan.

Analysis of the observation data is ongoing and the second flight will contribute greatly to the understanding of aerosols, surface pressure and surface albedo, said Shan. He noted that during the eight-hour flight, key technologies of Fabry-Pérot spectrometer were successfully demonstrated and validated, leading to the second flight in April. It is anticipated, said Shan, that the technologies can now be readily be implemented on a future satellite mission.

And while the flight and the successful retrieval of observation data were exciting, one of the most memorable and life-changing moments for Shan was having a front row view of the Northern Lights, which, as if to celebrate the success of his project, decided to put on an early and magnificent appearance.

Using a model similar to what meteorologists use to forecast weather on Earth and a computer simulation of the physics of evaporating ices, a new study, published in the journal Nature by York University Professor John Moores, Department of Earth & Space Science and Engineering at the Lassonde School of Engineering, has found evidence that snow and ice features previously only seen on Earth, have been spotted on Pluto.

“Penitentes” which are formed by erosion, are bowl-shaped depressions with spires around the edge and are several metres high.

The groundbreaking research, done in collaboration with researchers at NASA and Johns Hopkins University, indicates that these icy features may exist on other planets where environmental conditions are similar.

“The identification of the ridges of Tartarus Dorsa as Penitentes suggests that the presence of an atmosphere is necessary for the formation of penitentes, which would explain why they have not previously been seen on other airless icy satellites or dwarf planets,” says Moores.  “But exotic differences in the environment give rise to features with very different scales. This test of our terrestrial models for penitentes suggests that we may find these features elsewhere in the solar system, and in other solar systems, where the conditions are right.”

Moores, along with his York postgraduate fellow, Christina Smith; Anthony Toigo, at the Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University; and, NASA Research Astrophysicist, Scott D. Guzewich, at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, USA, compared their model to ridges on Pluto imaged by the New Horizons spacecraft in 2015. Pluto’s ridges are much larger – 500 metres tall and separated by three to five kilometres – as compared to their meter-sized earthly counterparts.

“This gargantuan size is predicted by the same theory that explains the formation of these features on Earth,” says Moores.  “In fact, we were able to match the size and separation, the direction of the ridges, as well as their age: three pieces of evidence that support our identification of these ridges as penitentes.”

Moores says though Pluto’s environment is very different from the Earth – it is much colder, the air much thinner, the sun much dimmer and the snow and ice on the surface are made from methane and nitrogen instead of water – the same laws of nature apply.  Both NASA and Johns Hopkins University were instrumental in the collaboration that led to this new finding.  Both provided background information on Pluto’s atmosphere using a model similar to what meteorologists use to forecast weather on Earth. This was one of the key ingredients in Moores’ own models of the penitentes, without which this discovery would not have been made.