Tag: Pluto

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This may be the best view of Pluto we ever see

Image: Pluto surface
Craters and linear features are scattered across Pluto’s terrain in this high-resolution view from NASA’s New Horizons probe. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)

Almost a year after NASA’s New Horizons probe flew past Pluto, the team behind the mission has put together a long mosaic strip that includes all of the highest-resolution images.

“This new image product is just magnetic,” Alan Stern, a planetary scientist from Southwest Research Institute who serves as New Horizons’ principal investigator, said today in a NASA news release. “It makes me want to go back on another mission to Pluto and get high-resolution images like these across the entire surface.”

The view starts up at the edge of Pluto’s disk and runs hundreds of miles, down to nearly the terminator line between Plutonian day and night. The width of the strip ranges from 45 to 55 miles, depending on the perspective. Peak resolution is about 260 feet per pixel.

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Clean water ice found on Pluto’s moon Hydra

Image: Hydra
An image captured during the New Horizons flyby in July 2015 shows Hydra, Pluto’s outermost moon. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)

If you’re looking for a place to chip off an ice cube for a cool interplanetary drink, you can’t do much better than Hydra, Pluto’s outermost moon.

Newly released readings from NASA’s New Horizons mission reveal that Hydra’s surface is dominated by nearly pristine frozen water. It’s significantly purer than the mixed-up ice on the surface of Pluto – or even the water ice found on the surface on Charon, Pluto’s biggest moon.

The findings are drawn from the first compositional data relating to Pluto’s four smaller moons, including Hydra as well as Nix, Styx and Kerberos. The infrared spectral readings were acquired almost 10 months ago, when the piano-sized New Horizons spacecraft flew past the Plutonian system. But the data had to stay stored in the onboard computer’s memory until only recently.

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Nitrogen rivers may have once flowed on Pluto

This enhanced color image of Pluto highlights the many subtle color differences between Pluto’s distinct regions. The imagery was collected by the spacecraft’s Ralph/MVIC color camera on July 14, 2015, from a range of 22,000 miles. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)
This enhanced color image of Pluto highlights the many subtle color differences between Pluto’s distinct regions. The imagery was collected by the spacecraft’s Ralph/MVIC color camera on July 14, 2015, from a range of 22,000 miles. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)

Rivers and lakes of liquid nitrogen may have splashed over Pluto’s surface hundreds of millions of years ago, and could do so again, due to shifts in the dwarf planet’s orbit and the tilt of its orbit.

That hypothesis is a good fit for the evidence collected last July when NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft zoomed past the dwarf planet and its moons, scientists said today.

Today’s revelations came during a review of New Horizons’ findings at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas. Research teams shared their latest findings about the mission, including some that have yet to be published in journals such as Icarus.

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Clouds on Pluto? Pictures spark discussion

Image: Pluto's limb
An image captured by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft last July 14 shows the edge of Pluto and its atmospheric haze, including what appears to be a light wispy cloud toward the right side of the image. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI via New Scientist)

Even before NASA’s New Horizons probe flew past Pluto, scientists thought they might see clouds in its thin atmosphere – and now a couple of pictures suggest they were spotted.

One of the pictures from last July’s flyby, published by New Scientist today, shows what appears to be a light-colored wisp amid the dwarf planet’s haze.

Michael Buckley, a spokesman for Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, told GeekWire that the science team is still discussing the data.

“What the team can say at this point is Pluto’s atmosphere, including hazes, is complex, and scientists continue to analyze and discuss incoming data as part of the normal science process,” Buckley said in an email. “As always, we’ll post a feature just as soon as we have more analysis and consensus.”

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Why methane snow covers Pluto’s peaks

Image: Methane on Pluto
The inset pictures show a section of Pluto’s Cthulhu Regio that includes a reddish plain as well as a 260-mile-long mountain range. The far right inset indicates the distribution of methane ice in purple, as observed by New Horizons’ Ralph/MVIC imager during the spacecraft’s flyby on July 14, 2015.

The dark terrain informally known as Cthulhu Regio sweeps nearly halfway around Pluto’s equator, with light-colored peaks sticking up from the surrounding plains. What is that light-colored stuff? Apparently, it’s methane frost.

Evidence for Pluto’s methane meteorology was laid out today by the science team behind NASA’s New Horizons mission.

The piano-sized spacecraft’s cameras zeroed in on Cthulhu when it flew past Pluto last July 14. Most of the region is covered with a layer of dark reddish tholins, a substance that forms when sunlight breaks down hydrocarbons such as methane.

Then there are those bright peaks in southeast Cthulhu: When the scientists looked closely at compositional data collected by New Horizons’ Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera, they found that the bright areas on top of Cthulhu’s mountains matched up with the spectral signature of methane ice.

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Pluto’s polar canyons get their close-up

Image: Pluto north polar region
This enhanced-color image was obtained by New Horizons’ MVIC camera about 45 minutes before closest approach on July 14, 2015, when the spacecraft was 21,100 miles away. The lower edge of the image measures about 750 miles long. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)

The heart-shaped region along Pluto’s equator has been the darling of NASA’s New Horizons mission, but it’s the north polar region that gets the love in this week’s featured image.

The area seen here is part of a region informally known as Lowell Regio. That’s a tribute to Percival Lowell, the millionaire astronomer who sparked the search that eventually led to Pluto’s discovery.

Toward the left side of the image, there’s a canyon that measures about 45 miles wide. Other canyons, to the east and west, are about 6 miles wide. These formations hint at tectonic activity in ancient times, according to the New Horizons science team.

Near the lower right corner, there are irregularly shaped pits that span as much as 45 miles. The science team says those pits are about 2.5 miles deep, and may indicate locations where subsurface ice has been lost from below. That would have caused the surface layer to collapse into the void.

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Did Pluto’s moon Charon once have an ocean?

Image: Charon
This close-up of Charon’s canyons was taken by NASA’s New Horizons probe during last July’s flyby. The color-coded picture shows elevation data. Serenity Chasma’s depth can exceed 4 miles in places. In comparison, the Grand Canyon’s maximum depth is a mile. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)

Scientists say the patterns of ice in canyons on Charon, Pluto’s largest moon, look as if some the frozen water was once liquid. And that suggests Charon had a subsurface ocean in ancient times.

The evidence comes from close analysis of images and elevation data collected last July when NASA’s New Horizons probe zoomed past Pluto and its moons. Even before the flyby, scientists speculated that Charon may have harbored liquid water, and that some water may still flow beneath its icy surface. The stereo measurements from New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LORRI, are consistent with that hypothesis.

The clues come in the form of stretch marks in the ice around Serenity Chasma, a canyon that’s 4.5 miles deep in some places.

“Charon’s tectonic landscape shows that, somehow, the moon expanded in its past, and – like Bruce Banner tearing his shirt as he becomes the Incredible Hulk – Charon’s surface fractured as it stretched,” the science team said in an image advisory on Thursday.

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Scientists dissect Pluto’s heart

Image: Pluto map
This map of the left side of Pluto’s heart-shaped feature uses colors to represent Pluto’s varied terrains, which helps scientists understand the geological processes at work. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the scientists behind NASA’s New Horizons mission are sharing a map that brings a different perspective to Pluto’s heart.

The map shows clearly that the dwarf planet’s bright heart-shaped region, informally known as Tombaugh Regio, can be broken into two geologically distinct areas.

The left side is dominated by an icy plain of frozen nitrogen, called Sputnik Planum. This is the part of the heart that’s dissected in the New Horizons team’s color-coded chart.

The map covers an area that measures 1,290 miles from top to bottom, which is roughly the width of the United States from north to south.

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Pluto probe spots ice islands in a nitrogen sea

Image: Pluto's icy hills
This image focuses in on a part of Pluto’s heart-shaped region where hills of water ice appear to be floating on top of a nitrogen glacier. Challenger Colles, toward the top of the inset photo, is a wide cluster of water-ice hills. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)

There’s plenty of evidence that Pluto is a frozen water world, with mountains of ice that rise more than 10,000 feet in height, but here’s something even weirder: Huge chunks of frozen H2O appear to be floating in a sea of frozen nitrogen, like icebergs in Earth’s polar regions.

Those are among the findings reported on Feb. 4 in this week’s update from NASA’s New Horizons mission. The piano-sized New Horizons spacecraft collected gigabytes’ worth of observations last year during its July 14 flyby, and it’s been sending back data ever since then.

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NASA puts Pluto and its heart on a valentine

Image: Pluto valentine
Pluto is all smiles in NASA’s valentine. (Credit: NASA)

Say it with Pluto? After NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft spotted a heart-shaped region on Pluto, you had to know it was just a matter of time before the dwarf planet made its appearance on a valentine.

Sure enough, this year’s crop of printable Valentine’s Day cards from NASA’s educational Space Place website includes a stylized Pluto.

“You’ll always be in my heart!” the card reads.

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