New Photos and Findings From New Horizons’ Pluto Mission

Among the authors are two from University of Maryland – Silvia Protopapa and Douglas Hamilton.

Rather, a new close-up view of this landscape that mission scientists at NASA released earlier this week shows rather odd-looking terrains that are criss-crossed by troughs.

As mentioned, Pluto’s Sputnik Planum is believed to be about 100 million years old, which makes it quite young when compared to other geological features on the orb’s surface. Protopapa, an assistant research scientist in astronomy at UMD, previously revealed details about the surface composition of Pluto and Charon using ground-based spectroscopic measurements and sophisticated modeling.

Hopefully, New Horizons will be able to fill in a few gaps. Researchers also looked at the first images of Nix and Hydra, the smallest of Pluto’s five moons, and found they are more reflective than its largest, Charon. LEISA is a near-infrared spectral imager created to map the surface composition of Pluto and its moons. This data offers the first clear evidence of water ice on Pluto, following decades of trying to detect it using Earth-based telescopes.

Furthermore, they say, “Some of the processes operating on Pluto appear to have operated geologically recently, including those that involve the water ice-rich bedrock as well as the more volatile, and presumably more easily mobilized, ices”. Variations like these are likely to cause Pluto to have a variety of colors, so even if it is the furthest away planet from the sun, it is definitely a paradise of colors.

“This latest image, from the heart of Pluto’s heart feature, shows the plain’s enigmatic cellular pattern (at left) as well as unusual clusters of small pits and troughs (from lower left to upper right)”.

Ice mountains about 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) high – but no obvious craters – are visible in this photo, which was captured by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft on July 14, 2015 from a distance of 47,800 miles (77,000 kilometers).

Important lessons were also taught by the geological complexity displayed by Charon and Pluto.

The team of this spacecraft has now published an academic paper that is 8 pages long and is featured in the Journal Science’s 16th October issue. It also tackles Pluto’s atmosphere, its composition and the conclusions that can be drawn after the first set of images that New Horizons sent back.