Category Archives: New Horizons mission

New Horizons mission, Pluto

The Pluto Pipeline Resumes

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Images and Data Come Tumbling in from the Kuiper Belt

Pluto in the distance, with Charon. July 3, 2015. Courtesy New Horizons mission.
Pluto in the distance, with Charon. July 3, 2015. Courtesy New Horizons mission.

What to make of this distant planet, Pluto?

It was, for so many years, an afterthought in the solar system — not very well respected, probably because it was so far away. Too dim to see. Discovered by an American who didn’t even have a Ph.D. when he found it. How could something so small and insignificant be very important? Not that long ago (in the late 20th century), people really didn’t take it that seriously. Not until the first glimmerings of a mission to this distant world began to take shape.

This 220-mile (350-kilometer) wide view of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft includes dark, ancient heavily cratered terrain; bright, smooth geologically young terrain; assembled masses of mountains; and an enigmatic field of dark, aligned ridges that resemble dunes; its origin is under debate. The smallest visible features are 0.5 miles (0.8 kilometers) in size. Credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Now, New Horizons has done her job. In a few short hours in July, it captured the images and data it’s now sending back to the science teams. The latest ones started flowing in over Labor Day weekend, and we’re starting to see them — along with scientist commentaries — on the mission Web sites. We’re finding out what a weird and different place Pluto is. Nope, it’s not a “dreg” of the solar system, anymore. It could well be the key to understanding not just all the objects “out there”, but also unlocking some secrets of solar system formation that only Pluto can tell.

That’s the way science works. There’s always a hidden secret that gets revealed, something that scientists might have overlooked or been distracted from by other, more dazzling finds. The devil, as we so often like to say, is in the details.

And, wow — are there details in those views! Mountains, cracked surfaces, possible dunes, tholin-covered ices, and much more. As Alan Stern said in today’s press release, “If an artist had painted this Pluto before our flyby, I probably would have called it over the top — but that’s what is actually there.”

So, now the job of explaining how it all got there begins. Mountains rising up out of the icy surface, possibly triggering nitrogen ice flows. What look like possible “glacier cut” valleys across the plains — what’s causing that action? What interior process could be at work in such a cold place? And, how can all this happen on a world where the atmosphere is escaping so rapidly?

Pluto is giving us WAY more than we bargained for. Today’s headline is correct: it’s complicated. And that’s the best kind of science I know of. It stimulates the wit and intellect, and keeps everybody on their toes.

New Horizons mission, planetary science, planets, Pluto

Exploring the Mountains of Pluto

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Pluto’s Surface Has Changed Over Time

A newly discovered mountain range lies near the southwestern margin of Pluto’s Tombaugh Regio (Tombaugh Region), situated between bright, icy plains and dark, heavily-cratered terrain. This image was acquired by New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on July 14, 2015 from a distance of 48,000 miles (77,000 kilometers) and received on Earth on July 20. Features as small as a half-mile (1 kilometer) across are visible. Courtesy NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI
A newly discovered mountain range lies near the southwestern margin of Pluto’s Tombaugh Regio (Tombaugh Region), situated between bright, icy plains and dark, heavily-cratered terrain. This image was acquired by New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on July 14, 2015 from a distance of 48,000 miles (77,000 kilometers) and received on Earth on July 20. Features as small as a half-mile (1 kilometer) across are visible. Courtesy NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

So, Pluto has a second set of mountains along one edge of Tombaugh Regio (the heart-shaped region). The planet continues to stun all of us with amazing views sent back by New Horizons, and the mountains are just the latest in a long string of discoveries to come. I can’t say I’m totally surprised to see them; I remember a geology teacher once saying where there’s one mountain range on a world, shaped by some kind of internal process, there’s bound to be another.

These mountains aren’t quite as high as the Norgay Montes, first seen on July 15th, but they’re still pretty spectacular-looking. They rise up to perhaps only a kilometer or so, but they look quite sharp, standing out in relief against the bright landscape. It looks like they may be younger than the surrounding landscape, but that’s just my guess. If so, then this surface is changing, indeed!

The thing that caught my eye after I checked out the mountains was that very interesting interface between the dark region and the brighter material that makes up Sputnik Planum (which is part of Tombaugh Regio). At first glance, I could tell that there’s been some filling in of craters by the white material. That’s another clue that the lighter-colored landscape is much younger than the darker regions. In fact, the team suspects the dark region is billions of years old, while the lighter landscape is less than a hundred million years old. That’s pretty young in planetary science terms, when you think about it. The solar system formed some 4.56 BILLION years ago, so this surface has only been around for a short time compared the age of the Sun and other worlds.

What Could Be Causing the Mountains on Pluto?

As I mentioned in my article of a few days back, called  Pluto is Geologically Active, mountain-building processes here on Earth are driven by plate tectonics, which is itself driven by heat and motions beneath the planet’s crust. We don’t know yet what’s driving it on Pluto. The planet is just about 70 percent rock, so it might be that there’s activity in the interior related to decay of radioactive materials or some other process.

If that activity generates or is driven by heat, that would affect the icy surface, possibly causing mountains to form in some way, and ices to flow to create smoothed-over landscapes. Remember, the ices on Pluto are largely nitrogen and methane, and those can melt and/or sublimate at pretty low temperatures, so you wouldn’t need a lot of heat. I look forward to hearing a more nuanced and scientifically informed interpretation of the images from the New Horizons team.

There will be a science press conference on the 24th (you can watch at NASA.TV), and I suspect we’ll hear more about those mountains and the dichotomy between the dark and light regions of the planet. So, as I like to say, stay tuned!

Note: the spacecraft has gathered 50 gigabits of data, which it will be sending back over the ever-increasing distance between it and the Earth over the next 16 months. At times, the spacecraft will be returning various types of data, not all of it imaging. However, the team will be releasing images as often as they can, generally once a week or so. The best way to keep up with the news from New Horizons is to check out www.nasa.gov/newhorizons and/or pluto.jhuapl.edu — where you’ll find images, videos, and discussions of the latest Pluto scientific discoveries.