WATCH: On July 14, 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft flew within roughly 8,000 miles (12,875 km) of Pluto, moving at a speed of 30,000 miles (48,280 km) an hour.
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That is going to be one of the outstanding questions that scientists are going to look at over the coming months and years.
Pluto, demoted from planet status in 2006, is now considered the biggest known dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt. She is one of more than 150 authors of the Science paper. “Pluto’s diverse surface geology and long-term activity also raise fundamental questions about how it has remained active many billions of years after its formation”.
And considering the team was expecting a long-dead, cratered mass like our moon, Stern says, “We were also taught important lessons by the degree of geological complexity that both Pluto and its large moon Charon display”.
The difference between the bulk densities of Pluto and its large moon, Charon is approximately 10 percent, which follows the rock features of the two similar celestial bodies.
Researchers spotted mountains reaching as tall as the Rockies, says Dr. Olkin. Flyby images show regions that are dark red, pale blue, golden and white.
Although Pluto was first photographed in 1915, researchers did not recognize the object for what it was.
In a scientific paper, experts said that they discovered Pluto’s surface to have diverse landforms, terrains, color and varied components.
“I was astonished to see such spectacular surface color and geological diversity”, said Silvia Protopapa, an assistant research scientist in astronomy at the University of Maryland and part of the New Horizons surface composition team. Certain materials absorb certain wavelengths, which allows the team to determine what an element is by looking at which wavelengths it reflects back.
“Some of the processes operating on Pluto appear to have operated geologically recently, including those that involve the water ice-rich bedrock as well as the more volatile, and presumably more easily mobilized, ices….”
Pluto’s distinctive heart-shaped sea is filled with ice that would be poisonous to people, astronomers said Thursday – made up of frozen carbon monoxide and methane. This is in addition to the water ice announced last week (but not included in this paper) discovered in the red areas. This implies that there are other materials on the planet besides the nitrogen, carbon monoxide and methane ices that were seen in Earth-based observations. It is thought to be made up of fresh, relatively recent deposits of nitrogen ice.
Histogram of Pluto and Charon radiance factor (I/F), a ratio of how much light is reflected compared to how much light is received, for various regions. Moons and planets get resurfaced all the time, but it is often the result of tidal squeezing that results from the gravitational influence of nearby worlds, which in turn leads to volcanic activity.
Pluto’s small moons Nix (left) in enhanced colour and Hydra are covered by the ice we’re most familiar with – frozen water. There is also a few information about two smaller moons, Nix and Hydra, which were both significantly brighter than scientists expected-another Plutonian puzzle. We have received only a glimpse of its largest moon, Charon, but it is a breathtaking one. “We may have gotten to Pluto just as it is beginning to catastrophically condense onto the surface”. But even so, external forced should have darkened and dulled their brightness.
The New Horizons spacecraft will send back higher resolution images, which will show exquisite new details of a world that is more handsome than anyone had ever imagined. “We don’t know how to make that happen”.
This, he continued, could be because Pluto and Charon dominate the system in a binary orbit. For little Nix and Hydra, Charon’s gravity may make it too hard to keep an eye on Pluto. The spacecraft was able to capture a number of remote sensing and in situ dimensions of Pluto and its five-moon system.
“The data from New Horizons is rewriting the text books about the outer Solar System”.
That confounded the New Horizons team.
“The New Horizons mission completes our initial reconnaissance of the solar system, giving humanity our first look at this fascinating world and its system of moons”, Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in a press release.
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“Pluto itself is incredibly complicated, much more so than we’ve seen in any small planet before”, said Alan Stern, planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and principal investigator for the New Horizons mission to Pluto.
