Twitter is filled with #PlutoFlyby musings. He’s anticipating a growing interest in the dwarf planet.
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Scientists on the mission were elated when they finally got a look.
“Home run!” said Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado.
The spacecraft has enough fuel to carry on its exploration, and Stern said he plans to ask NASA for funding to continue using New Horizons beyond its Pluto mission, in order to study more objects in the Kuiper Belt.
The New Horizons spacecraft has sent back initial high-resolution photos of the dwarf planet Pluto and its moon Charon.
Mission scientist John Spencer told journalists that one image of Pluto’s surface showed a terrain that had been resurfaced by some geological process – such as volcanism – in the last 100 million years. The United States is now the only nation to visit every single planet in the solar system. By contrast, a smooth surface is one that’s been refreshed, somewhat recently, and perhaps continuously. Its status as a dwarf planet is the subject of debate.
Pluto’s geologic activity has also surprised scientists because, unlike other bodies in the solar system, Pluto can not be heated by other planets. Pluto has no giant neighbor.
These mountains lie on the edge of the heart-shaped region (which of course has led to some excitement).
“Should Pluto be a planet?”
Scientists do not know how Pluto formed such big mountains, the tallest of which juts nearly 3,350 metres off the ground, almost as high as the Canadian Rockies.
Pluto isn’t the only story. “But, in this instance, our spacecraft did exactly what it was supposed to do”, Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman said.
Pluto until a few weeks ago was a blurry dot, albeit a blurry dot known to have bright and dark regions. “Informally, we’ve been referring to that as Mordor”, Olkin says, nodding to the land of doom in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
The press conference wasn’t all science.
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Lowell Observatory’s Will Grundy, head of the New Horizons surface composition team, said that some images of Charon make the feature look like an impact basin, which might at first be surprising to find perfectly at the pole. Researchers Wednesday said they would call the region Tombaugh Regio to honour astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930.
