However there is no evidence for them yet.Īdditional high resolution images for “Tombaugh Reggio” area are being transmitted back to Earth today and will continue. There may be geysers or cryovolcanoes,” New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado, said during the media briefing. NASA announces discovery of icy mountain ranges on Pluto at July 15 media briefing at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “This may cause us to rethink what powers geological activity on many other icy worlds,” says Spencer of SwRI. Some other process must be generating the mountainous landscape, said the team. Unlike the icy moons of giant planets, Pluto cannot be heated by gravitational interactions with a much larger planetary body. The finding of ice mountains has major scientific implications. Several craters are seen and much of the surface looks reworked rather than ancient. The large, heart-shaped region is front and center. This is the last and most detailed image sent to Earth before the spacecraft’s closest approach to Pluto on July 14. “And I’m very surprised that there are no craters in the first high resolution images.” Pluto nearly fills the frame in this image from the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) aboard NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, taken on Jwhen the spacecraft was 476,000 miles (768,000 kilometers) from the surface.
“I never would have imagined this!” Spencer exclaimed. Spencer also announce that the heart shaped region will now be named “Tombaugh Reggio” in honor of Clyde Tombaugh, the American astronomer who discovered Pluto in 1930.
“It’s a very young surface, probably formed less than 100 million years old,’ said Spencer. The new close-up image released today showed an icy mountain range near the base of the heart with peaks jutting as high as 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) above the surface, announced John Spencer, New Horizons science team co-investigator at the media briefing.
Today the team announced that New Horizons has already made a totally unexpected discovery showing clear evidence of ice mountains on Pluto’s surface in the bright area informally known as the ‘big heart of Pluto.’ At upper right, along the moon’s curving edge, is a canyon estimated to be 4 to 6 miles (7 to 9 kilometers) deep. Today, we get the first sampling of the scientific treasure collected during those critical moments, and I can tell you it dramatically surpasses those high expectations.” Crisp new view of Pluto’s largest moon, Charon shows a swath of cliffs and troughs stretches about 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) from left to right, suggesting widespread fracturing of Charon’s crust, likely a result of internal processes. “The mission has had nine years to build expectations about what we would see during closest approach to Pluto and Charon. “Pluto New Horizons is a true mission of exploration showing us why basic scientific research is so important,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Pluto was the last unexplored planet, building on missions that exactly started 50 years ago in 1965 when Mariner IV flew past Mars.
With the first ever flyby of Pluto, America completed the initial up close reconnaissance of the planets in our solar system. Credits: NASA/JHU APL/SwRIĪPPLIED PHYSICS LABORATORY, LAUREL, MD – Scientists leading NASA’s historic New Horizons mission to the Pluto system announced the first of what is certain to be a tidal wave of new discoveries, including the totally unexpected finding of young ice mountains at Pluto and crispy clear views of young fractures on its largest moon Charon, at a NASA media briefing today (July 15) at the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.Ī treasure trove of long awaited data has begun streaming back to Mission Control at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory to the mouth watering delight of researchers and NASA. New close-up images of a region near Pluto’s equator reveal a giant surprise - a range of youthful mountains rising as high as 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) above the surface of the icy body.
0 kommentar(er)
