Is That a Big Crater on Pluto? Pyramidal Mountain Found on Ceres

universetoday.com ^ | on June 30, 2015 | Bob King

[BenLurkin]

You’re probably as eager as I am for new images of Pluto and Ceres as both New Horizons and Dawn push ever closer to their respective little worlds. Recent photos, of which there are only a few, reveal some wild new features including what appears to a large crater on Pluto.

In the end, this apparent large impact might only be a contrast effect or worse, an artifact of over-processing, but there’s no denying its strong resemblance to foreshortened, shadow-filled craters seen on the Moon and other moons. It’s also encouraging that an earlier photo from June 27 shows the same feature. But the “crater” is just so … big! Its size seems disproportionate to the Pluto’s globe and recalls Saturn’s 246-mile-wide moon Mimas with its 81-mile-wide crater Herschel.

[BenLurkin]

The latest photo of Pluto (lower left) and its largest moon Charon taken on June 29. A large possible crater-like feature is visible at lower right. Charon shows intriguing dark markings. Pluto’s diameter is 1,471 miles (700 miles smaller than Earth’s Moon); Charon is 750 miles across. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Pluto with its enigmatic “crater” photographed on June 27. The apparent row of three depressions near the bottom of the globe are most likely artifacts from processing. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

[BenLurkin]

One for your APOD list perhaps.

[BenLurkin]

New Horizons LORRI gallery page:
https://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons/lorri-gallery

[The_Victor]

[Marko413]

LOL that’s no moon!

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks BenLurkin, extra to APoD.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks BenLurkin. Mike Brown (discoverer of some of the TNO/minor planets) at least used to attribute the Pluto/Charon pair to an impact. It's around here somewhere...

join or quit view topics view or post blog bookmark post new topic subscribe

[SunkenCiv]

• Tenth Planet Has a Moon! [2005; Thanks vannrox]

  "When we test collision models to predict how Pluto and Charon formed, the models kept producing tiny satellites, much smaller than Charon," added Brown "But we had never seen satellites that small before in the Kuiper belt. But then we found a moon in the Santa system, and then we found another moon circling Xena, and they both look very similar to one another. This leads us to conclude that the largest objects in the Kuiper belt may have been subject to collisions."

[Darksheare]

Obama took a bite out of it.
“Yummy, dog is good eatin’.”

[SunkenCiv]

Did an ancient impact bowl Pluto over?
New Scientist | October 5, 2007 | Maggie McKee
Posted on 10/30/2007 7:29:02 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1918724/posts