A tweet by the mission, that Stern retweeted, says the spacecraft has a new bumper sticker that reads “my other vehicle explored Pluto”. The image shows a region free of impact craters with mountains of ice rising above its surface.
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According to NASA scientists, Pluto looks to be a very young surface probably because it has been bombarded by other objects in the Kuiper belt. And it’s getting a lot of interesting reactions from the scientific community, not only about Pluto itself, but how we think about icy worlds in our solar system.
Although there are craters visible on Charon’s surface, there are not almost as many as scientists had thought, and that suggests that Charon has been geologically active in the relatively recent past.
The images revealed a range of mountains as high as 11,000 feet above Pluto’s surface. Those mountains are less than 100,000 million years old – regarded by scientists as “youthful” in a 4.56-billion-year-old solar system.
“It’s a small world with deep canyons, troughs, cliffs and dark regions that are still mysterious to us”, New Horizons deputy project scientist Cathy Olkin said during a news conference revealing the image of Charon at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab.
The dwarf planet was scanned by instruments aboard the space probe during a flyby of several hours, creating the images released Wednesday by NASA’s New Horizons team. The image’s resolution can resolve surface features less than one mile wide.
Another one of Pluto’s moons is also getting some New Horizons love.
Pluto has fascinated astronomers since 1930, when it was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh using the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz. This indicates that Charon’s crust has numerous fractures which might have been caused due to internal geological processes.
New Horizons spacecraft travelled more than nine years to reach Pluto after it was launched from Cape Canaveral on January, 19, 2006.
Imaging obtained by New Horizons and transmitted to Earth early Wednesday morning also shed light on Pluto’s outermost moon Hydra.
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As shown by previous investigations, Pluto’s surface holds vast amounts of nitrogen and methane ice.
