Pluto’s glowering red atmosphere may be harbouring a complex concoction of hydrocarbons, according to the latest images from Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft. “It’s fitting that the two climbers who first summited Earth’s highest mountain have their names on this new Everest”, said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute.
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After passing Pluto, New Horizons will be headed out to the Kuiper Belt where several Kuiper Belt Objects with diameters exceeding 20 miles (35 km) are expected to be targeted for encounter and similar measurements to those made at Pluto.
Nasa believes this rarefied atmosphere forms when sunlight stimulates the creation of complex hydrocarbons, such as ethylene and acetylene, from the breakdown of methane.
Also, there has been a lot of speculation about the bright, heart-shaped region of Pluto, the tail of nitrogen gas that the dwarf planet emits, and the newer-looking parts of Pluto’s surface possibly being younger.
The ice appears to flow in much the same way as glaciers do on Earth and could go a long way to explaining some of the processes that have been recently reshaping Pluto’s surface.
“At Pluto’s temperatures of minus-390 degrees Fahrenheit, these ices can flow like a glacier”, said Bill McKinnon, deputy leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team at Washington University in St. Louis.
“We’ve only seen surfaces like this on active worlds like Earth and Mars”, said mission co-investigator John Spencer of SwRI.
But the mission has not ended yet, the spacecraft is still sending pictures of the dwarf planet on earth and these pictures are unprecedented ones.
New Horizons was crowned first spacecraft to take a trip to Pluto and also its particular staff of moons therefore far is back about 5% of one’s pics and skill records gathered in days and nights prior to, during and right away after July 14 flyby.
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The spacecraft is healthy and all systems are operating normally. The probe has to share its “talking time” with NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN).
