Dr Alan Stern, New Horizons Principal Investigator of the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, said, “This image really makes you feel you are there, at Pluto, surveying the landscape for yourself”. The images were gathered by the New Horizons spacecraft that swept past the dwarf planet in July.
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New photos of Pluto released by NASA scientists revealed Earth-like icy mountains, plains, and a low-lying haze. During the animation, the altitude of the observer rises until it is about 10 times higher to show about 80 per cent of the hemisphere New Horizons flew closest to on July 14, 2015.
And zooming in on the centre of the image brings the mountains and plains into even sharper focus.
In addition to being the good resolution these provides the information about the low-lying haze and the weather changes on Pluto and this can be tracked by the leader of the New Horizon composition team from Lowell Obsevatory, Arizona. The backlit photograph additionally reveals new particulars about Pluto’s nitrogen-dominated environment, displaying many various layers, extending from ground-bound fog to wispy tendrils greater than 60 miles (100 km) up.
The photo of the fog or haze, combined with evidence taken from other photos, hints that Pluto may have something very much like Earth’s hydrological cycle, only involving ice made of substances other than water, such as nitrogen. A few of Sputnik Planum’s ice apparently evaporates, will get deposited in a area of tough terrain to the east after which flows again down into the plain as glaciers, by way of a system of valleys.
Launched in 2006, New Horizons passed by Jupiter in 2007 on its journey to Pluto.
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 new Ralph imager panorama also shows glaciers flowing back into Sputnik Planum from this blanketed region.
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These glaciers are just like these seen in Greenland and Antarctica right here on Earth, researchers stated. The fastest spacecraft ever, the probe traveled at 30,000 miles per hour on its epic trip.
