Observed within Hydra’s bright regions is a darker circular structure with a diameter of around 6 miles (10 km).
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New Horizons descended to just 12,500km above the surface of Pluto, giving it the opportunity to create detail surface maps as it zipped past at 50,000km/h.
“I don’t think any one of us could have imagined that it was this good of a toy store”, said New Horizons’ lead scientist Alan Stern. “Pluto just had its first visitor!” Now that communication has been restored, data and images are pouring in.
Celebrities have even got in on the act, with comedian Stephen Colbert delivering an update on New Horizon’s mission, alongside famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who famously as director of the Hayden Planetarium championed the reclassification of Pluto from its position as the ninth planet on the solar system to simply a dwarf-planet.
“This deep topography means that the bedrock that made these mountains must be H2O-of water ice”.
“It might be active right now”, said project scientist John Spencer. Frozen nitrogen and methane have been detected, but those ices are too weak to be bent and lifted into mountains. Dr. Stern, however, had no doubt.
NASA has finally published the first image of Pluto after its New Horizons spacecraft successfully completed its mission and captured the icy mountains.
That has the space agency now searching the data coming back from the space probe for evidence of geysers and volcanoes.
Cliffs jut out for hundreds of miles across the planet, which is also scared by several canyons, some of which are six miles deep.
“There is so much interesting science in this image alone”. “I can add that Charon did not disappoint either”. “But, in this instance, our spacecraft did exactly what it was supposed to do”, Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman said.
The New Horizons spacecraft has spent the last nine years traversing the 3 billion miles between Earth and Pluto.
Scientists didn’t know until Tuesday night – when New Horizons phoned home – that the unprecedented encounter was a success. “The mission has had nine years to build expectations about what we would see during closest approach to Pluto and Charon“.
This week, we were given the chance to see a new world for the first time again. That sounds arcane, but to hear these scientists talk about it, you’d have thought someone had given each of them a pony. That would make them “mere youngsters” in a 4.56-billion-year-old solar system. Perhaps life could evolve on these planets.
Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, has also been brought into focus.
Yesterday the human race received the clearest images ever taken of Pluto.
In the end, New Horizons proved that Pluto is not a featureless ball of ice, but a planet rich with texture and geologic activity, proving that we still have an bad lot to learn about our own solar neighborhood.
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Follow the New Horizons mission on Twitter and use the hashtag #PlutoFlyby to join the conversation.
