New Horizons, a piano-sized spacecraft that has been traveling 3 billion miles through the solar system for more than nine years, made its closest approach to Pluto on Tuesday.
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Well, it turns out Pluto isn’t quite as cuddly as its canine counterpart belonging to Mickey Mouse.
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.
THESE are the first images acquired by Nasa spacecraft New Horizons during its historic flyby of Pluto. He’s anticipating a growing interest in the dwarf planet. Astronomers estimate it formed about 100 million years ago, which makes it a young geological feature.
“This is one of the youngest surfaces we’ve ever seen in the solar system“, said Jeff Moore of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team (GGI) at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.
The latest spectra from New Horizons Ralph instrument reveal an abundance of methane ice, but with striking differences from place to place across the frozen surface of Pluto.
“This deep topography means that the bedrock that made these mountains must be H2O-of water ice”.
The image was captured when New Horizons was about 478,000 miles away from Pluto’s surface.
On Tuesday, NASA’s New Horizons space probe flew past Pluto at a distance of 12,500 kilometers, the closest we have ever come to the planet and will for a while.
“It’s a small world with deep canyons, troughs and cliffs and dark regions that are still mysterious to us”, said mission deputy project scientist Cathy Olkin during a news conference Wednesday afternoon.
The New Horizons spacecraft is already a million miles on the other side of Pluto, heading towards the outer reaches of the Kuiper Belt.
This Monday, July 13, 2015 combination image released by NASA shows… That last bit has scientists a tad puzzled as planets are not expected to be geologically active when they’re not orbiting much larger bodies.
On Wednesday, Alan Stern, New Horizons’s principal investigator, said, “We now have an isolated small planet that is showing activity after 4.5 billion years”. The planet generates heat on its own, and from these first images, the scientists can’t say why-possibly the presence of radioactive elements.
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The newest image shows the surface of Pluto.
