Image credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI.NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft spied several features on Pluto that offer evidence of a time millions or billions of years ago when — thanks to much higher pressure in Pluto’s atmosphere and warmer conditions on the surface — liquids might have flowed across and pooled on the surface of the distant world. “In addition to this possible former lake, we also see evidence of channels that may also have carried liquids in Pluto’s past,” said Alan Stern, Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado—principal investigator of New Horizons and lead author of the scientific paper.
This feature appears to be a frozen, former lake of liquid nitrogen, located in a mountain range just north of Pluto’s informally named Sputnik Planum. Captured by the New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) as the spacecraft flew past Pluto on 14 July 2015, the image shows details as small as about 430 feet (130 metres). At its widest point the possible lake appears to be about 20 miles (30 kilometres) across.
Researchers have revealed the pH of water spewing from geyser-like plumes on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Their findings are an important step toward determining whether life could exist, or could have previously existed, on the sixth planet’s sixth-largest moon.
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.
In June 2015, when the cameras on NASA’s approaching New Horizons spacecraft first spotted the large reddish polar region on Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, mission scientists knew two things: they’d never seen anything like it elsewhere in our Solar System, and they couldn’t wait to get the story behind it.
