Sharper versions will be sent down over the next 16 months as the spacecraft slowly beams all of its raw data across the solar system. It will likely make its last transmission in October or November of next year, officials said.
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The new, close-up image of Charon has revealed a chasm 4-6 miles deep and also further evidence of active resurfacing.
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”. Some of the first photographs are revealing awesome things about the solar system’s most distant celestial body. “We’ve estimated that that point will be reached sometime in the mid-2030s, roughly 20 years from now”, he said.
The dwarf planet was scanned by instruments aboard the space probe during a flyby of several hours, creating the images released Wednesday by NASA’s New Horizons team. Since Pluto does not receive any heat from a host planet or another satellite, NASA will seek an explanation for how the distant dwarf planet remains geologically active.
This Monday, July 13, 2015 combination image released by NASA shows Pluto, left, and its moon, Charon, with differences in surface material and features depicted in exaggerated colors made by using different filters on a camera aboard the New Horizons spacecraft.
Hydra was approximately 400,000 miles away from New Horizons when the image was acquired.
It is the first high-resolution ever taken of Pluto’s surface and shows mountains and other geologic activity. One photo in particular – a black and white detail of a 150-mile-wide section of Pluto’s surface – suggested just how much new information might be gleaned from such an unprecedented perspective.
WESTCHESTER COUNTY, New York – Highly anticipated photos of the dwarf planet Pluto revealed surprising images for scientists.
Digital reams of data and photography are being received from New Horizons…
John Spencer said the relatively thin coating of methane, carbon monoxide and nitrogen ice on Pluto’s surface was not strong enough to form mountains, so they were probably composed of Pluto’s water-ice bedrock.
“We see water ice on Pluto for the first time”.
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“New Horizons has finally nailed the basic physical properties of Hydra”, Hal Weaver, New Horizons Project Scientist and LORRI science operations lead, said in a statement.
