The physicist said, “The New Horizons probe showed you that there may well be a subsurface ocean on Pluto, which means – if our understanding of life on Earth is even slightly correct – that you could have living things there”.
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The image by the NASA’s also provides the evidence we observe the hydrological cycle on Pluto, but involves the soft and exotic ices, including nitrogen is present in the Pluto. The image depicted rugged terrain with mountains about 11,000 feet high surrounded by plains and glaciers.
We begin our tour over the jagged Norgay Montes, an ice mountain range comparable to the Rockies, at a height of about 120 miles. “But this image is also a scientific bonanza, revealing new details about Pluto’s atmosphere, mountains, glaciers and plains”.
Foggy nitrogen hangs 60 miles above Pluto’s surface, according to an analysis of images sent September 13 by the New Horizons spacecraft. In this image it clearly shows that, it has dozen thin layers extending from near the ground to at least 100 km above the surface.
“In addition to being visually stunning, these low-lying hazes hint at the weather changing from day to day on Pluto, just like it does here on Earth”, Will Grundy of the New Horizons Composition team said. We travel north across the mysteriously textured plains of Sputnik Planum (the bright area to the left) and Cthulhu Regio (the darker, cratered region to the right), all the while gaining altitude. NASA believes that the ice may have been evaporated and deposited.
“These features are similar to the frozen streams on the margins of ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica”.
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Alan Howard, a member of the mission’s Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team from the University of Virginia said that they were surprised to discover that Pluto had a nitrogen-based glacial cycle in spite of being an icy dwarf planet. The next mission is expected to take place at the Kuiper Belt region, an area alleged to have asteroids, comets, and icy bodies.
