NASA has released some of the sharpest images ever captured of Pluto, giving new insight into the dwarf planet.
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By better understanding this complex, and often unsafe environment, we can hopefully learn how to better protect future spacecraft and human beings from the risks posed by space travel. Then there are cases of various particles entering the solar system from outside our heliosphere.
Pluto’s details pop in this newly colorized high-resolution mosaic photo from NASA.
The images, obtained during the New Horizons mission in July, show craters and mountainous and glacial terrain on Pluto’s surface.
The New Horizons team, which performed the first ever flyby of Pluto this summer, took four photos of the object on November 2.
According to NASA, these eye-opening observations could shed further light on the solar system’s early days, due to the theory that small Kuiper Belt Objects are most likely more primitive and pristine than the icy climate of Pluto, which still shows signs of recent geological activity on its dimpled, rocky surface. Releases of this sort have been numerous over the past several months as NASA passed by Pluto back in July.
The clouds, known as coronal mass ejections, can be seen around Earth.
These particles’ speed, density and temperature and also the direction and the embedded magnetic fields’ strength constituted the space environment.
Though the vacuum of space is about a thousand times emptier than a laboratory vacuum, it’s still not completely empty.
The Enlil model, named for the Sumerian god of the wind, is one of the primary models used to simulate the space environment near Earth and is the basis for the New Horizons simulation.
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Because particles must travel for many months before reaching Pluto, the CMEs eventually spread out and merge with other CMEs and the solar wind to form larger clouds of particles and magnetic field.
