This simulated flyover of Pluto’s Norgay Montes (Norgay Mountains) and Sputnik Planum (Sputnik Plain) was created from New Horizons closest-approach images. Norgay Montes have been informally named for Tenzing Norgay, one of the first two humans to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Sputnik Planum is informally named for Earth’s first artificial satellite. The images were acquired by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on July 14 from a distance of 48,000 miles (77,000 kilometers). Features as small as a half-mile (1 kilometer) across are visible.
Source: Cosmos
Some 13 hours after it flew closest to Pluto, New Horizons finally had a 15-minute window in which to beam back a status report. Scientists were already studying the data transmitted in the days before the flyby. This confirmed Pluto is the largest known body beyond Neptune. In many people’s eyes this has renewed the case for Pluto being classified as a planet – though it is only a handful of kilometres larger than its fellow Kuiper Belt object, Eris.
Most intriguing were the colour pictures taken on the last day of approach. They showed a remarkably complex Pluto with several distinct geological provinces.
Even a bright heart-shaped feature - now informally dubbed Tombaugh Regio in honour of American astronomer and Pluto’s discoverer Clyde Tombaugh - proved to be composed of two distinct regions, tinted white on the left and blue on the right. “From the ground we knew there were a lot of different colours on Pluto, but we never imagined anything like this,” said New Horizons scientist Cathy Olkin, from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
The first close-ups of Charon and Pluto were even more remarkable.
Giant mountains, probably made of rock-hard water ice, towered 3,300 metres above Pluto’s surface. Scientifically, the biggest shock so far is the complete lack of impact craters on the entire 250-by-150-kilometre image.
Scientists had expected to find a world frozen and long-dead, thoroughly pockmarked by collisions with meteorites that had slammed into the dwarf planet over eons, like our cratered Moon. Instead, Pluto appears fresh-faced.
“This is not an ancient landscape,” said John Spencer, a planetary scientist also from Southwest Research Institute. “We think it has to be less than 100 million years old” – a blink of an eye, in geological terms.
How a cold, tiny world such as Pluto can have been recently geologically active – let alone active enough to form a smooth new crust over much of its surface, and produce mountains comparable in height to some of the Earth’s great ranges – is baffling. “This is a landscape that has been reshaped by forces from the interior of Pluto that we don’t begin to understand,” Spencer said.
The conventional wisdom has been that a small icy world can only be active when there’s a massive planet such as a Jupiter or Saturn nearby, whose giant gravity exerts a tidal tug that distorts the tiny world and warms its insides through friction.
“But that can’t happen on Pluto,” he added. Charon might be big for a moon, but it isn’t capable of producing such gravitational energies in its present orbit. And Pluto is well out of the gas giants’ gravitational reach.
The discovery is “going to send a lot of geophysicists back to the drawing board to try to figure out jut how that can be”, Spencer said.
Scientists expect many more surprises in the countless images still to come. Information from New Horizons takes four and a half hours to reach the Earth, and is transmitted at about two kilobits per second, which is slower than internet dial-up speeds. At that rate, it will take 16 months for all New Horizons’ flyby data to be received.
Most intriguing were the colour pictures taken on the last day of approach. They showed a remarkably complex Pluto with several distinct geological provinces.
Even a bright heart-shaped feature - now informally dubbed Tombaugh Regio in honour of American astronomer and Pluto’s discoverer Clyde Tombaugh - proved to be composed of two distinct regions, tinted white on the left and blue on the right. “From the ground we knew there were a lot of different colours on Pluto, but we never imagined anything like this,” said New Horizons scientist Cathy Olkin, from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
The first close-ups of Charon and Pluto were even more remarkable.
Giant mountains, probably made of rock-hard water ice, towered 3,300 metres above Pluto’s surface. Scientifically, the biggest shock so far is the complete lack of impact craters on the entire 250-by-150-kilometre image.
Scientists had expected to find a world frozen and long-dead, thoroughly pockmarked by collisions with meteorites that had slammed into the dwarf planet over eons, like our cratered Moon. Instead, Pluto appears fresh-faced.
“This is not an ancient landscape,” said John Spencer, a planetary scientist also from Southwest Research Institute. “We think it has to be less than 100 million years old” – a blink of an eye, in geological terms.
How a cold, tiny world such as Pluto can have been recently geologically active – let alone active enough to form a smooth new crust over much of its surface, and produce mountains comparable in height to some of the Earth’s great ranges – is baffling. “This is a landscape that has been reshaped by forces from the interior of Pluto that we don’t begin to understand,” Spencer said.
The conventional wisdom has been that a small icy world can only be active when there’s a massive planet such as a Jupiter or Saturn nearby, whose giant gravity exerts a tidal tug that distorts the tiny world and warms its insides through friction.
“But that can’t happen on Pluto,” he added. Charon might be big for a moon, but it isn’t capable of producing such gravitational energies in its present orbit. And Pluto is well out of the gas giants’ gravitational reach.
The discovery is “going to send a lot of geophysicists back to the drawing board to try to figure out jut how that can be”, Spencer said.
Scientists expect many more surprises in the countless images still to come. Information from New Horizons takes four and a half hours to reach the Earth, and is transmitted at about two kilobits per second, which is slower than internet dial-up speeds. At that rate, it will take 16 months for all New Horizons’ flyby data to be received.
