A spectacular sampling of imagery from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft reveals mountains and water ice bedrock on Pluto, an active crust on its largest moon Charon and the first resolved views of the icy world’s tiny mini-moons.
A snapshot of Pluto shows fresh deposits of water ice bedrock and 11,000-foot (3500-metre) mountains, revealing evidence Pluto’s surface is one of the youngest in the solar system. These mountains likely formed no more than 100 million years ago, suggesting the close-up region — which covers about one percent of Pluto’s surface — may still be geologically active today. Unlike the icy moons of giant planets, Pluto cannot be heated by gravitational interactions with a much larger planetary body. Some other process must be generating the mountainous landscape. Photo credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRINew Horizons found few craters on the surface of Pluto’s Texas-sized moon Charon, evidence of recent geologic activity. A swath of cliffs and troughs stretching about 600 miles (1,000 kilometres) suggests widespread fracturing of Charon’s crust, likely the result of internal geological processes. The image also shows a canyon estimated to be 4 to 6 miles (7 to 9 kilometres) deep. In Charon’s north polar region, the dark surface markings have a diffuse boundary, suggesting a thin deposit or stain on the surface. Photo credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRITuesday’s New Horizons flyby revealed Pluto’s tiny moon Hydra. The first resolved image of the object shows it to be 28 miles long and 19 miles in diameter, and better images are to come. The observations also indicate Hydra’s surface is probably coated with water ice. Photo credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI
There is no sign of an undiscovered moon lurking around Pluto in data streaming back to Earth from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, and that is surprising to Alan Stern, the scientist in charge of the probe.
A crescent Pluto stars in pictures captured just after NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft’s July flyby of the distant dwarf planet, exposing eerie backlit fog banks and glacial flows that scientists say hint at an Earth-like weather cycle.
Scientists with NASA’s New Horizons mission have assembled this highest-resolution colour view of Wright Mons, one of two potential cryovolcanoes spotted on the surface of Pluto by the New Horizons spacecraft in July 2015. The feature is 90 miles across and 2.5 miles high, which would make the largest volcano in the outer solar system.
