What Are the Strange Spots on These Brand New Images of Pluto?

As NASA’s New Horizons steadily makes its way to the Pluto system, the spacecraft has confirmed that there is methane on the planet. And so is New Horizons, which will fulfill its destiny when it performs a flyby of Pluto on July 14th.

Looking closely at the pictures one can see some white spots on Pluto’s equator.

Though the spots were not quite in total focus for the spacecraft, the researchers estimated each one was about 300 miles across, which is large enough to be a state. “For example, the bright fringe we see on Pluto may represent frost deposited from an evaporating polar cap, which is now in summer sun“.

The images show just how much lighter the mottled tan surface of Pluto is compared to the moody gray of its largest moon, Charon.

LORRI, Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager, has produced black-and-white high resolution images, and when combined with color data in lower resolution from the Ralph camera, it’s possible to see basically what the spacecraft itself is approaching – the natural colors of Pluto and Charon.

The flyby of Pluto is scheduled on July 14 but the New Horizons spacecraft already detected methane ice thanks to its infrared spectrometer. Pluto failed to be standardized as a planet along with Eris and they both had been labeled as dwarf planets.

At 3 billion miles away, and at about two-thirds the size of our moon, there’s never been really good pictures of Pluto taken before. Astronomers believe methane on Pluto may be left over from the original material that formed the Solar System 4.5 billion years ago. New Horizons Mission Design Lead Yanping Guo, of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, says without the adjustment, New Horizons would have arrived 20 seconds late and 114 miles (184 kilometers) off-target from the spot where it will measure the properties of Pluto’s atmosphere.

There will be an open house during the first hour with a viewing of a scale model of the New Horizons spacecraft and displays provided by NASA describing the mission.

Indeed, vice president and general manager Jim Oschmann of the Civil Space and Technology business unit at Ball Aerospace, notes, “We know so little about Pluto that we expect the mission to help answer questions we haven’t even thought to ask”.

Instruments on New Horizons also detected frozen methane on Pluto’s surface, NASA noted earlier this week.

New Horizons is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program.

However, no quick solution to the dark spot mystery is forthcoming right now as New Horizon will not be seeing the hemisphere containing the spots on July 14 though those sections will definitely be covered in the coming days.