Pluto reveals variety of rich colors, stunning experts

Stern, reached by phone at the Minneapolis airport Tuesday, said 85 percent of the data gathered on flyby has yet to be transmitted to Earth.

The findings so far have been “unexpectedly exciting”, Mark Sykes, director of the Arizona-based Planetary Science Institute, told GeekWire. “It’s that diversity across this world that just makes it fascinating”.

Currently, researchers are still combing through the data New Horizons is sending back.

A few craters measure up to a startling 260km in diameter, while others have broken down or been filled with materials, like nitrogen ice.

A false-color image of Pluto and Charon exaggerates differences to make features easier to see.

Instead, water-ice must be present in a sort of bedrock on the planet. A significant chunk of Tombaugh Regio, known as Sputnik Planum, is especially smooth.

As of Thursday, October 15, the journal Science has now published the very first research paper from the mission: The Pluto system: Initial results from its exploration by New Horizons.

“By looking at Pluto, we learn about the many many other things like it in the outer solar system”, Brown says. However, even at this resolution, much of the heart’s interior appears remarkably featureless – possibly a sign of ongoing geologic processes.

The New Horizons team notes that Triton, likely a former Kuiper Belt planet captured by Neptune, was considered the best analog for Pluto prior to the July 14 flyby.

Pluto’s range of colour and brightness is highly varied..

Sputnik Planum, a shiny plain of icy flows, might be the answer: a gateway between the atmosphere and the lukewarm hell of the core.

And right smack dab in Sputnik Planum is a large glacier.

Pluto is full of surprises – about 100 of them and counting, to be exact. Scientists suspected that the heart’s smooth, bright western lobe contains methane ice and carbon monoxide ice, while the dark red equatorial regions contain very little volatile ice.

As we finish mapping Pluto’s weird landmarks, the descriptive phase will end – and then we’ll hope to understand what sculpted these terrains in the first place.

Characteristic of glaciers is their ability to slide, slowly. “If you have enough heat released during Pluto’s early years, you can melt ice and form an ocean – but the ocean’s on the inside, and as it refreezes, it will give back that heat”. Yet the dwarf planet also has 3-kilometre-high ice mountains. But Pluto, says Stern, “is out there all by its lonesome”. “Everything suggests this ice is exceptionally soft” – making it unique in the Solar System.

It should all be in hand by this time next year, he said, and analysis of it by planetary scientists will no doubt raise even more questions. Charon and Pluto’s other moons don’t have sufficient mass to account for the planet’s heat.

During the approach to Pluto, Hamilton helped ensure that the New Horizons spacecraft would not encounter nor crash into any previously undiscovered moons, rings or debris as it approached and passed by Pluto.

Much like Earth, Pluto has a blue sky. But why are other areas not like this? Tholins are actually a range of reddish colors.

The source of Pluto’s reshaping, evidenced in its plains of frozen ices and towering ice mountains, is a mystery awaiting solution. The data returned so far show a surprisingly wide variety of landforms and terrain ages on Pluto, as well as variations in color, composition and albedo (surface reflectivity).

This news release is available in Japanese. This image was generated by software that combines information from blue, red and near-infrared images to replicate the color a human eye would perceive as closely as possible, NASA said. The icy dwarf planet has a much more elliptical orbit around the sun than Earth: perhaps the spacecraft arrived as the atmosphere began to freeze. It was the first photograph New Horizons sent home after briefly losing communication on July 4. Exposure to UV light would cook them into heavier tholins that settle on the surface.

When Clyde Tombaugh finally confirmed Pluto’s existence in 1930, it was named by 11-year-old Venetia Burney.

New Horizons launched in January 2006, just months before the global Astronomical Union demoted Pluto to “dwarf planet” status, in August 2006.

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

Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, is mostly pale-coloured, but there’s “puzzling dark terrain” on its north pole. They had also detected nitrogen and carbon monoxide on the surface from previous observations.

“The best image that we have of Pluto before New Horizons was just kind of a blur”, Olkin says. Taken by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Faint Object Camera, the image showed both objects clearly, but little else. A global atmospheric haze was seen extending to an altitude of almost 100 miles.