“Today, the New Horizons team is bringing what was previously a blurred point of light into focus”.
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“Everybody was interested and upset back in 2006 when Pluto lost its stripes”.
The mountains cover just one percent of Pluto’s surface and Moore and his colleagues base the youthful age estimate on the lack of craters in this scene.
Pluto has mountains made of ice that are as high as those in the Rockies, images from the New Horizons probe reveal.
Scientists still aren’t sure how those characteristics might have been formed. Activity on other icy bodies is powered by gravitational pulls from nearby larger objects, which Pluto does not have.
As a tribute to Pluto’s discoverer, Stern and his team named the bright heart-shaped area on the surface of Pluto the Tombaugh Reggio. Examples of the extensive national coverage include.
A packed room- filled with children and adults- gathered to see the crisp images, which will eventually be replaced with even higher quality photos, as the image data is gradually fed back to Earth.
New Zealand Herald: incredible pics the closest you’ll get to Pluto: “Another historic leap for humankind”.
A new sneak-peak image of Hydra is the first to reveal its apparent irregular shape and its size, estimated to be about 43-33 km.
Our first real picture of Hydra, one of Pluto’s smaller moons, as captured during the July 14 flyby.
(Bowman) “We’ll probably end up pulling it apart and say this part resembles that on this world, but there’s nothing like it.”
The agency released the first of New Horizons’ eagerly-anticipated flyby images Wednesday.
The new close-up shows the mountain range near Pluto’s heart, with peaks that reach 11,000 feet. Well it appears that Charon has quite the varied terrain, with cliffs and troughs stretching for around 600 miles, which indicates some interesting geological activity. That’s a region of the solar system beyond Neptune that is filled with thousands of Pluto-like ice-and-rock worlds believed to be remnants from the formation of the solar system, some 4.6 billion years ago.
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The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland designed, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
