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
Three years outbound from Pluto, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is homing in on a Kuiper Belt object dubbed Ultima Thule for a dramatic New Year’s Day flyby, the first by any space probe in the extreme outer solar system.
A newly discovered mountain range lies near the southwestern margin of Pluto’s Tombaugh Regio (Tombaugh Region), situated between bright, icy plains and dark, heavily-cratered terrain. This image was acquired by New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on July 14, 2015 from a distance of 48,000 miles.
Mission planners preparing for the New Horizons flyby of a Kuiper Belt object on 1 January will attempt to monitor starlight as it is blocked out by the probe’s target, Ultima Thule, to update critical navigation data. Updated 4 August
