Posted on 07/18/2015 6:47:31 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Towering mountains of water ice rise up to 3500 meters tall on Pluto, above smooth plains covered in veneers of nitrogen and methane ice, NASA’s New Horizons team announced today. The discovery, along with the finding that parts of the dwarf planet’s surface are crater-free and therefore relatively young, points to a place that has been geologically reworked in the recent past. “It could even be active today,” said John Spencer, a New Horizons team member at Southwest Research Institute (SWRI) in Boulder, Colorado, at a press conference today at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.
The team also showed off new images of unexpectedly smooth surfaces on Pluto’s moon Charon—which, without an atmosphere, was expected to have an even more battered surface than Pluto. Radioactive elements in both bodies’ interiors could provide some of the heat needed for geological mountain building or ice flows that repave the surface. But Pluto, and especially Charon, are far too small for this heat to persist. The giant impact thought to have formed the two worlds could also provide a source of energy, but that probably happened billions of years ago.
“It’s going to send a lot of scientists back to the drawing boards,” said Alan Stern, the mission’s principal investigator at SWRI, at the press conference. Scientists outside the team suggest that the puzzlingly youthful surfaces could be explained if the dwarf planet and its moon were formed in a far more recent impact event, or if their reservoirs of water ice were mixed with other compounds that can melt and flow and lower temperatures.
Although the number of TV crews parked outside APL has diminished considerably since the historic flyby on 14 July, the power of Pluto to dazzle continues to grow.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.sciencemag.org ...
kuiper belt object. we need to get past the lovable disney character.
It’s a deathstar. Isn’t it obvious?
It’s got to be pretty darned cold out there, so must be water with antifreeze in it.
Charon's a monster of a big moon compared to Pluto!
Exellent post SeekAndFind, thank you.
I thought they blew off Pluto as a planet a few years ago... Or am I wrong?
For a couple of weeks I was afraid they were not going to get any really good photos of Pluto. Those they were showing were blurry.
They finally ended up being really clear.
I read a discussion on whether Pluto should be called a planet or not and I think the best argument was that it should be.
Pluto is classified as a “dwarf planet”- massive enough to collapse into a sphere but not big enough to clear other objects from its orbital path. Ceres and Vesta, formerly classified as asteroids, also qualify as dwarf planets.
Keep in mind that resolution of 4 kilometers per pixel is still going to miss important details. This was a recon run at high speed not a really detailed survey like the latest Mars orbiter that detected car-sized objects from orbit.If only the planetary probes had the money given to the enemies of modern life we could be getting LOTS more data .
How do they know it is young? Is it possible there are fewer asteroids and crap flying around that far out in the solar system?
One would think so. And that its inclination of 17 degrees would also keep it out of the line of fire. But what do I know.
Clifford Simak had a different explanation in his great SF story "Construction Shack."
All the meteors and comets that have hit the earth and the moon have come from outside our solar system, and were attracted by the Sun's gravity.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.