‘Beautiful eye candy’: Frozen plains in Pluto’s heart

“This terrain is not easy to explain”, said Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team.

“I don’t think any one of us could have imagined that it was this good of a toy store”, principal scientist Alan Stern said at a news conference. [New Horizons’ Epic Pluto Flyby: Complete Coverage]. It’s possible these shapes are created by convention within Pluto, heating and melting the surface likely a slowly bubbling pot of porridge.

The region has a broken surface of irregularly-shaped segments, roughly 12 miles (20 km) across, bordered by what appear to be shallow troughs.

Sen-NASA’s New Horizons team revealed fresh findings about Pluto today including a close-up of a vast “cracked” and icy plain and the existence of a tail caused by the escaping atmosphere. “This could be only a week old, for all we know”.

The team also identified dark streaks in the left of the picture.

Of the surprising early results from Tuesday’s flyby, Moore said, “I’m still reminding myself to take deep breaths”. “We’re still entertaining, as you can tell, the widest range of hypotheses”. “Jumping to conclusions comes at great peril”.

New Horizons is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, managed by the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

New Horizons’ science instruments include spectrometers and dust detectors, along with its cameras, mapping Pluto’s surface and studying the dwarf planet’s five known satellites.

As the nitrogen is lost, it’s impacted by charged particles coming from the Sun: the so-called solar wind. The weak gravity of Pluto means the nitrogen atmosphere of Pluto is escaping into space. The company has utilized the CPU for transmitting data back to planet Earth, control the thrusters, as well as track the sensors of the probe.

By comparison, NASA’s Maven Mars mission has found that the red planet is losing about 1 tonne of atmosphere per hour.

In addition to Charon, Pluto is also orbited by Hydra, its outermost moon. The flyby Tuesday was a success and even before the moment, the spacecraft delivered our best look at the dwarf planet and helped determine its actual size.

This particular image actually gives researchers a preview of what the surface of this large moon will look like in future close-ups from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft.

New Horizons will spend the next 16 months transmitting data from back to Earth from its encounter with Pluto, with the information being categorized by low, medium and high priority.