{"id":5263,"date":"2015-07-16T07:23:08","date_gmt":"2015-07-16T07:23:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revoscience.com\/en\/?p=5263"},"modified":"2015-07-16T07:23:08","modified_gmt":"2015-07-16T07:23:08","slug":"from-mountains-to-moons-multiple-discoveries-from-nasas-new-horizons-pluto-mission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/from-mountains-to-moons-multiple-discoveries-from-nasas-new-horizons-pluto-mission\/","title":{"rendered":"From Mountains to Moons: Multiple Discoveries from NASA\u2019s New Horizons Pluto Mission"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"unnamed\"<\/a>Icy mountains on\u00a0Pluto and a new, crisp view of its largest moon,\u00a0Charon<\/span><\/a>, are among the several discoveries announced Wednesday by NASA’s New Horizons team, just one day after the spacecraft\u2019s first ever Pluto flyby.<\/span><\/p>\n

“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. “The mission has had nine years to build expectations about what we would see during closest approach to Pluto and Charon. 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.”<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHome run!\u201d said Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. \u201cNew Horizons is returning amazing results already. The data look absolutely gorgeous, and Pluto and Charon are just mind blowing.”<\/span><\/p>\n

A new close-up image of an equatorial region near the base of Pluto\u2019s bright\u00a0heart-shaped feature<\/span><\/a>\u00a0shows a mountain range with peaks jutting as high as 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) above the surface of the icy body.<\/span><\/p>\n

The mountains on Pluto likely formed no more than 100 million years ago — mere youngsters in a 4.56-billion-year-old solar system. This suggests the close-up region, which covers about one percent of Pluto\u2019s surface, may still be geologically active today.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThis is one of the youngest surfaces we\u2019ve ever seen in the solar system,\u201d said Jeff Moore of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team (GGI) at NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThis may cause us to rethink what powers geological activity on many other icy worlds,\u201d says GGI deputy team leader John Spencer at SwRI.<\/span><\/p>\n

The new view of Charon reveals a youthful and varied terrain. Scientists are surprised by the apparent lack of craters. A swath of cliffs and troughs stretching about 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) suggests widespread fracturing of Charon\u2019s crust, likely the result of internal geological processes. The image also shows a canyon estimated to be 4 to 6 miles (7 to 9 kilometers) deep. In Charon\u2019s north polar region, the dark surface markings have a diffuse boundary, suggesting a thin deposit or stain on the surface.<\/span><\/p>\n

New Horizons also observed the smaller members of the Pluto system, which includes four other moons: Nix, Hydra, Styx and Kerberos. A new sneak-peak image of\u00a0Hydra\u00a0<\/span><\/a>is the first to reveal its apparent irregular shape and its size, estimated to be about 27 by 20 miles (43 by 33 kilometers).<\/span><\/p>\n

The observations also indicate Hydra’s surface is probably coated with water ice. Future images will reveal more clues about the formation of this and the other moon billions of years ago.\u00a0Spectroscopic data<\/span><\/a>\u00a0from New Horizons\u2019 Ralph instruments reveal an abundance of methane ice, but with striking differences among regions across the frozen surface of Pluto.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland designed, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA\u2019s Science Mission Directorate. SwRI leads the mission, science team, payload operations and encounter science planning. New Horizons is part of NASA\u2019s New Frontiers Program, managed by the agency\u2019s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Icy mountains on\u00a0Pluto and a new, crisp view of its largest moon,\u00a0Charon, are among the several discoveries announced Wednesday by NASA’s New Horizons team, just one day after the spacecraft\u2019s first ever Pluto flyby. “Pluto New Horizons is a true mission of exploration showing us why basic scientific research is so important,” said John Grunsfeld, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":5264,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-space-news"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/unnamed.png",1041,742,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/unnamed-150x150.png",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/unnamed-300x213.png",300,213,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/unnamed.png",750,535,false],"large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/unnamed-1024x729.png",750,534,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/unnamed.png",1041,742,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/unnamed.png",1041,742,false],"ultp_layout_landscape_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/unnamed.png",1041,742,false],"ultp_layout_landscape":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/unnamed.png",800,570,false],"ultp_layout_portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/unnamed.png",600,428,false],"ultp_layout_square":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/unnamed.png",600,428,false],"newspaper-x-single-post":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/unnamed.png",687,490,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-big":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/unnamed.png",505,360,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-list-image":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/unnamed.png",91,65,false],"web-stories-poster-portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/unnamed.png",640,456,false],"web-stories-publisher-logo":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/unnamed.png",96,68,false],"web-stories-thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/unnamed.png",150,107,false]},"author_info":{"info":["Amrita Tuladhar"]},"category_info":"Space\/ AstroPhysics<\/a>","tag_info":"Space\/ AstroPhysics","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5263\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}