22 July 2015

Mountains in Pluto's heart


The BBC has an article by Rebecca Morelle about more discoveries on Pluto:
The latest images from the New Horizons spacecraft have revealed another range of ice mountains on Pluto. The frozen peaks (photo, top) were found on the lower-left edge of the dwarf world's "heart" and are over a kilometer high. They sit between a patch of icy, flat terrain, called Sputnik Planum, which scientists believe is less than a hundred million years old, and a dark area dating to billions of years ago. More close-ups will be unveiled on Friday at a press conference.
The team is finding different textures on the surface of the dwarf world. Jeff Moore, who leads the geology, geophysics and imaging team on New Horizons, said: "There is a pronounced difference in texture between the younger, frozen plains to the east and the dark, heavily-cratered terrain to the west. There's a complex interaction going on between the bright and the dark materials that we're still trying to understand."
The newly spotted mountains are about a hundred kilometers away from another range, now known as Norgay Montes, which appeared in some of the first images returned from last week's fly-by. Those peaks are much more lofty; standing at about three kilometers high, they rival the Rocky Mountains in size.
New Horizons has also captured images of two of Pluto's small moons: Nix and Hydra (photo, bottom). An image taken by the probe's high resolution camera, Lorri, reveals the most-detailed-view yet of Hydra, which is about fifty kilometers long and forty kilometers wide. The little satellite seems to have at least two large craters, and its top half looks darker than its bottom, suggesting the make-up of its surface may be varied. Another picture snapped by the Ralph instrument reveals Nix with its colors boosted, which is a technique that helps scientists to identify details on the surface they would otherwise be unable to see. Through this, the team has identified a reddish spot, which may be a crater. "Additional compositional data has already been taken of Nix, but is not yet downlinked. It will tell us why this region is redder than its surroundings," said mission scientist Carly Howett. "This observation is so tantalizing, I'm finding it hard to be patient for more Nix data to be downlinked."
Rico says the Universe continues to amaze...

No comments:

Post a Comment

No more Anonymous comments, sorry.