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.
NASA has released simulated perspective views looking into Occator Crater, which contains the brightest area on Ceres. The views were created from images captured by the Dawn spacecraft.
NASA’s New Horizons space probe, 10 days from a one-shot encounter with enigmatic Pluto, stopped collecting science data Saturday after a technical problem interrupted the spacecraft’s tightly-choreographed flight plan.
One of the strangest landforms spotted by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft when it flew past Pluto was the “bladed” terrain formally named Tartarus Dorsa. The blades reach hundreds of feet high and are typically spaced a few miles apart. No geology degree is necessary to see why the terrain is so interesting — just grab your red and green 3-D spectacles.
