Stern, reached by phone at the Minneapolis airport Tuesday, said 85 percent of the data gathered on flyby has yet to be transmitted to Earth.
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The New Horizons team described a wide range of findings about the Pluto system in its first research paper, published today. “It’s that diversity across this world that just makes it fascinating”.
Widely distributed impact craters up to 180 miles across can be seen on the hemisphere facing New Horizons, many of which “appear to be substantially degraded or infilled, and a few are highlighted by bright ice-rich deposits on their rims and/or floors”, Stern and company write. As soon as New Horizons started sending back information about the flyby, scientists noted obvious evidence of recent geological activity. And this knowledge should shed light on the long-ago giant collision that researchers think formed the Pluto-Charon system.
Pluto’s geological activity is driven both by heat leaking from radioactive elements in its interior – a remnant of its birth more than 4 billion years ago – and by the volatile compounds that flit between its surface and its atmosphere. It was made 15 minutes after the New Horizons’ spacecraft’s closest approach.
“As such, the young surface units on Pluto present a puzzle regarding the energy source(s) that power such resurfacing over time scales of billions of years”, Stern writes.
Nix (left) and Hydra, as imaged on July 14.
This image taken July 7, 2015, was an Internet sensation thanks to its clear view of a heart-shaped plain 1,200 miles across (2,000 kilometers).
Sputnik Planum, a shiny plain of icy flows, might be the answer: a gateway between the atmosphere and the lukewarm hell of the core.
Image copyright NASA Image caption The smooth area to the right is devoid of craters.
Pluto’s large moon, Charon, is providing its own share of surprises.
Mountains of that height can not be made of nitrogen or the other known ices, because they would collapse. The fact that craters vary in number depending on location has to do with the differing ages of the surfaces, the researchers suggest.
Characteristic of glaciers is their ability to slide, slowly. The reflective properties of Nix indicate that the small moon is likely covered in water ice.
The researchers also spotted cellular, polygonal shapes in the ice. It’s worth reading the new Science paper just to get a sense of how each new datapoint seems to raise ten times more questions about the origins and ongoing evolution of these worlds. “Everything suggests this ice is exceptionally soft” – making it unique in the Solar System. Pluto has no such massive companion, and is probably too small to have held on to the heat of its formation. Previously it was known as the ninth and most distant planet from the Sunday.
Pluto’s distinctive heart-shaped sea is filled with ice that would be poisonous to people, astronomers said Thursday – made up of frozen carbon monoxide and methane. Its pressure at Pluto’s surface is less than 10 microbars, which is not an easy unit of measure to grasp, until you realize that that’s one one-hundred-thousandth of the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere. But there are many competing models, and images of the Pluto-Charon system from afar didn’t help to decide between them.
In July, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft zipped through the Pluto system, marking the culmination of a nine-year journey through space. Little data about Charon’s atmosphere has been beamed back yet, with the exception that there isn’t much of it-significantly less than Pluto’s. That color comes from molecules that scatter light in blue wavelengths. Instead, its wildly varying terrain is a insane quilt of geological patterns and textures – copied, pasted and tweaked from other planets and moons. Charon and Pluto’s other moons don’t have sufficient mass to account for the planet’s heat. Tholins are actually a range of reddish colors. The high-altitude haze is thought to be similar in nature to that seen at Saturn’s moon Titan, according to a NASA news release.
This high-resolution image captured by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC). Astronomers noticed that the orbits of Uranus and Neptune were a bit irregular, possibly caused by another significant celestial body.
“The main takeaway is that Pluto is an active world”.
That revelation came as a big surprise, because many scientists had suspected that Pluto and other Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) have always been “dead” internally. The first frame is a digital zoom-in on Pluto as it appeared upon its discovery by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 (image courtesy Lowell Observatory Archives).
New Horizons is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, managed by the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, was even more of a mystery before the historic flyby. No other moons, or any evidence of a ring system, have been seen.
“Energetic radiation falling on Pluto’s atmosphere and surface, each rich in nitrogen and methane, likely creates tholins that even in small concentrations yield colors ranging from yellow to dark red”, they wrote. They had also detected nitrogen and carbon monoxide on the surface from previous observations. It was the first photograph New Horizons sent home after briefly losing communication on July 4.
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“The best image that we have of Pluto before New Horizons was just kind of a blur”, Olkin says.
