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
A long-awaited radio signal from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft landed on planet Earth late Tuesday, confirming the faraway space probe performed as expected during a one-shot flyby of Pluto at the solar system’s outer frontier.
A four-planet system orbiting the star Kepler-223 in the constellation Cygnus is actually a rarity: Its planets, all miniature Neptunes nestled close to the star, are orbiting in a unique resonance that has been locked in for billions of years. For every three orbits of the outermost planet, the second orbits four times, the third six times and the innermost eight times.
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft made a historic New Year’s encounter with an object nicknamed Ultima Thule in the Kuiper Belt a billion miles beyond Pluto. The probe passed around 3,500 kilometres from the mysterious object at 0533 GMT on New Year’s Day, making it the most distant Solar System body ever explored up close.