The International Business Times featured Noemi Pinilla-Alonso, a UT postdoctoral student, in this story about NASA’s flyby of Pluto on July 14. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will gather data to help scientists better understand the dwarf planet. Pinilla-Alonso will be the lead investigator of a new seven-day series of observations beginning July 23. Spitzer Space Telescope will gather infrared data at eighteen different longitudes. The data will reveal possible changes in ice on Pluto’s surface. “Spitzer is around 4.87 billion km (around 3 billion miles) from Pluto,” Pinilla-Alonso said. “The spacecraft provides an effective tool to study the ice on the surface and search for other materials that have not yet been identified.”
Pinilla-Alonso is a student in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.