Pluto Pictures From New Horizons Put a New Face on Dwarf Planet

nbc ^ | June 11, 2015 | Alan Boyle

[BenLurkin]

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is still 24 million miles and more than a month away from the dwarf planet Pluto, but the probe's pictures are already revealing a world that's more complicated than previously thought.

"They show an increasingly complex surface with clear evidence of discrete equatorial bright and dark regions — some that may also have variations in brightness," the mission's principal investigator, Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, said Thursday in an image advisory. "We can also see that every face of Pluto is different, and that Pluto's northern hemisphere displays substantial dark terrains."

The brightest as well as the darkest regions, however, appear to be on the icy world's equator or just south of it. "Why this is so is an emerging puzzle," Stern said.

Like previously released pictures, the images taken between May 29 and June 2 show a bright area at one of Pluto's poles that scientists suspect is an ice cap. Some of the pictures make it look as if Pluto is non-spherical — but the scientists say that's just an illusion, caused by the intensive image processing as well as the wide variations in surface brightness.

...

One picture that's been posted to the UnmannedSpaceflight.com discussion forum appears to show a dark streak dividing bright areas on Pluto's disk. Icelandic imaging whiz Björn Jónsson says it looks like an honest-to-goodness surface feature, and may hint at activity on the surface.

"Dark lines crisscrossing a disk! It's the discovery of canali on Pluto!" the Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla half-jokingly observed. "We have reached Schiaparelli-quality mapping of Pluto's surface!"

[Red Badger]

That’s udder nonsense!......................

[Red Badger]

Levee the gun, take the cannali.................

[Verginius Rufus]

Maybe those are Schiaparelli's photos of Mars.