New Pluto Images Show Staggeringly Diverse Surface Features

Advertisement
By Indo-Asian News Service | Updated: 11 September 2015 12:40 IST
New sharp images of Pluto have revealed a bewildering variety of surface features that have left scientists reeling because of their range and complexity.

Taken from Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft, the images reveal new features as diverse as possible dunes, nitrogen ice flows that apparently oozed out of mountainous regions onto plains, and even networks of valleys that may have been carved by material flowing over Pluto's surface.

"Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we have seen in the solar system," said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado.

New Horizons has begun its year-long download of new images and other data.

Advertisement

They show large regions that display chaotically jumbled mountains reminiscent of disrupted terrains on Jupiter's icy moon Europa.

Advertisement

"The surface of Pluto is every bit as complex as that of Mars," added Jeff Moore from Nasa's Ames Research Center in California.

The randomly jumbled mountains might be huge blocks of hard water ice floating within a vast, denser, softer deposit of frozen nitrogen within the region informally named Sputnik Planum, he explained.

Advertisement

New images also show the most heavily cratered and thus oldest terrain yet seen by New Horizons on Pluto next to the youngest, most crater-free icy plains.

There might even be a field of dark wind-blown dunes, among other possibilities.

Advertisement

"Seeing dunes on Pluto if that is what they are would be completely wild, because Pluto's atmosphere today is so thin," noted William B. McKinnon from Washington University-St Louis.

Images returned in the past days have also revealed that Pluto's global atmospheric haze has many more layers than scientists realised.

The haze actually creates a twilight effect that softly illuminates night-side terrain near sunset, making them visible to the cameras aboard New Horizons.

The New Horizons spacecraft is now more than five billion kilometres from Earth and more than 69 million kilometres beyond Pluto.

The spacecraft is healthy and all systems are operating normally, Nasa reported.

 

For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who'sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube.

Further reading: Europa, Nasa, Pluto, Science, Space
Advertisement

Related Stories

Popular Mobile Brands
  1. New Images of Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Show a Giant Jet Shooting Toward the Sun
  2. NASA's Europa Clipper May Cross a Comet's Tail, Offering Rare Glimpse of Interstellar Mate
  1. New Images of Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Show a Giant Jet Shooting Toward the Sun
  2. NASA’s Europa Clipper May Cross a Comet’s Tail, Offering Rare Glimpse of Interstellar Material
  3. Newly Found ‘Super-Earth’ GJ 251 c Could Be One of the Most Promising Worlds for Alien Life
  4. New Fossil Evidence Shows Dinosaurs Flourished Until Their Final Days
  5. Flattened Dark Matter May Explain Mysterious Gamma-Ray Glow at Milky Way’s Core, Study Finds
  6. NASA Telescopes Capture First-Ever Companion Star Orbiting Massive Red Supergiant Betelgeuse
  7. Scientists Caution That Artificial Cooling of Earth May Disrupt Monsoons and Weather Systems
  8. Carnegie Mellon’s AI Drones Can Build Mid-Air Structures With 90 Percent Success Rate
  9. Baai Tuzyapayi OTT Release Date: When and Where to Watch Marathi Romantic Drama Online?
  10. Maxton Hall Season 2 OTT Release Date: When and Where to Watch it Online?
Gadgets 360 is available in
Download Our Apps
Available in Hindi
© Copyright Red Pixels Ventures Limited 2025. All rights reserved.