It Just Gets Better and Better

I live on the side of an 11,000-foot peak in Colorado. That’s how tall the solar system’s newly discovered mountains on Pluto tower over the frozen landscape.

Imagine that.

Mountains on Pluto. That’s what New Horizons found there. And showed us this week.

To employ a well-known question we’ve heard a LOT this week: who ordered that?  And, what ELSE is it going to show us?

On Earth, mountains imply geologic activity. Tectonism. Or even volcanism. But, out at Pluto? It’s going to be an interesting time as the planetary scientists assimilate everything they’re learning and understand how it all works. But, the good news is, it all works according to the laws of physics, the geological laws, chemistry laws, and so on. In other words, it’s all going to be explained by science, just as it should be. And that’s just darned cool!

And, that’s not all: Charon has smooth areas that look relatively young, meaning that there’s activity inside this moon. What’s causing that?  There could be a few explanations. The one that comes to mind immediately is “radiogenic heating”, which is driven by the decay of radioactive elements inside, likely leftover from when Charon (and Pluto) formed. The same process could be at work inside Pluto, too.

It’s not likely that they’d be heated from the same kinds of tidal forces that heat up Enceladus or Triton, since the two worlds are locked in a synchronous orbit. Long story short, it’s going to be very interesting to determine just what’s keeping these two worlds so far from the Sun active enough to cause recent changes to their surfaces. Stay tuned!

Take a Long Last Look at THIS Side of Pluto!

Wow.  I got off the plane today heading to Pluto Central and was greeted with tweets and retweets of the latest image of Pluto from New Horizons. And, what a weird place it’s showing us.  It reminded me of an alien Plutonian Cthulu, or maybe even a frozen Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Polygons and dark regions, circular landscape features — all on the Charon-facing side of Pluto. And, doesn’t THAT beg a lot of questions about why it looks like that!  We talked about it over dinner tonight, speculating about the processes that are causing the surface features and asking ourselves, “Does Charon have anything to do with the way Pluto looks? And, if so, what’s happening?”

I suspect we’ll hear more in the next couple of days about what those processes might be and how they’d work. So, I won’t speculate about that. But, I will say that this world is just delivering more and better surprises each day.  Just to give you an idea, the large dark areas you see on this image about 480 kilometers wide (about 300 miles), and they appear to be much more are more complex than could be make out in earlier images.

The mission scientists are, of course, eagerly dissecting the images, especially looking at the regularly space dark and light spots along the equator, plus the polygon-shaped regions above the equatorial belt. And, they’re asking a lot of questions of their own. Are there plateaus on the surface? Plains? Or, could Pluto be a ball with weird bright and dark variations on an otherwise smooth surface?  Do the circular regions imply impact craters?

I’m not sure all those questions will get answered right away, but they will -— eventually. In the meantime, the mission continues and flyby is just around the corner. Stay tuned!