New Horizons Shows Off New Color Faces of Pluto

[IND151]

Can't wait for flyby photos!

Lets wait, it will take time.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

about 10 times the distance from the earth to the moon.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

it's showtime!!!!

Scale of Pluto and its moon compared to the earth.

Scale of our moon.

 

[Audio]

Pics in two days, yo!

 

[anant_s]

 

[ArsalanKhan21]

The New Horizons spacecraft is currently out of contact with Earth as it continues its observations. It can either transmit data or store observations. It will be transmitting data and new photos later today.

 

[ArsalanKhan21]

The Icy Mountains of Pluto | NASA


Pluto close up

Charon close up

 

[indian_foxhound]

The Icy Mountains of Pluto | NASA


Pluto close up

Charon close up

Incredible pictures... think how much advance we are now..

 

[KAL-EL]

Incredible pictures... think how much advance we are now..

Indeed.. and if we manage not to obliterate one another, I can only imagine the great advances to come. I'm just a little teary eyed that I won't be around to see the really good stuff become reality.

 

[21 Dec 2012]

it's showtime!!!!

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Scale of Pluto and its moon compared to the earth.
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Scale of our moon.

Earths moon is bigger than Pluto!

 

[ArsalanKhan21]

Scientists are speculating that Charon's dark spot is ice from Pluto | Stuff.co.nz

Scientists are speculating that Charon's dark spot is ice from Pluto
ROBERT GEBELHOFF

Last updated 17:53, July 17 2015

Nasa / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute
Scientists are debating the dark spot on Pluto's moon, Charon.


As scientists wait for a tidal wave of data from Pluto and its moons, they are peering through the existing photos and information to see what hypotheses they could test with the data.

One debate that's happening right now is about the dark spot on Pluto's moon-partner, Charon, which has been speculated to be the result of gases leaving Pluto and depositing onto the moon's surface. So in essence, they're sharing ice , and that's pretty cool.

But the theory is just that - a theory.

Nasa / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
Mountains as high as 3.3km above the equator of the dwarf planet Pluto. Photos have also shown that the surface of Pluto seems to be much smoother than that of Charon.


"We've been arguing," said William Grundy, of the New Horizons composition team. "The counter-proposal is that [the dark spot] is just an impact basin. That's an alternative explanation."

READ MORE: How a precocious 11-year-old girl gave Pluto its name

Scientists are also puzzled about the diversity of Pluto's surface. The area of its polar ice cap looks pretty similar to the left side of Pluto's heart, and they're not sure why. It could be due to altitude, or the ancient history of the planet, something coming from the interior.

Nasa / Reuters
The close-up of Charon shows an area approximately 390 kilometers from top to bottom, including few visible craters. The close-up photo was taken on Tuesday from 79,000 km; the main photo was taken on Monday from 465,000 km.


"Naively, you would expect differentiation by latitude," Grundy said. "That doesn't explain the heterogeneity in Pluto. We don't know; we need to figure that out."

They're looking for what could be Pluto's bedrock, or the material underneath the ice. They're looking for water-ice, but it could also just be a bunch of rock. (By the way, at the temperatures of Pluto, water is basically rock, because it doesn't sublimate like gases.)

These are the mysteries they will be grappling with as they sift through new data over the coming months, looking at the photos and heightening the colour to include things like infrared. Different molecules shoot back different colours, so theoretically, a high-definition photo with lots of pixels could tell where different kinds of ices - such as nitrogen, carbon monoxide and methane - are.

New Horizons has already revealed that Pluto is a bit bigger across than previously thought - by several kilometres. That might not seem to be a big difference, but scientists have already calculated its mass, so the discovery suggests the planet is less dense than thought. That could mean more ice and less rock.

The high-resolution photos have also shown that the surface of the icy world seems to be much smoother than its moon-partner, Charon, which seems to have far more impact craters.

Mission scientists suggest that means there is something at play - such as internal heat in the planet that is keeping the rock and ice of the body soft, or atmospheric processes like snow covering up the geologic features and making it smoother.

"I expected that it would be complicated and fascinating, but I had no idea that it would be this complicated and this fascinating," Grundy said.

- The Washington Post

 

[ArsalanKhan21]

New Pluto images reveal vast water deposits - Telegraph

New Pluto images reveal vast water deposits
Scientists have found vast frozen plains next door to Pluto's big, rugged mountains of water ice, it has been revealed

NASA New Horizons probe show surface of pluto Photo: NASA

By Agency

9:32PM BST 17 Jul 2015


Scientists have found vast frozen plains next door to Pluto's big, rugged mountains of water ice.

The New Horizons spacecraft team revealed close-up photos of those plains Friday, three days after the historic flyby. Scientists have unofficially named the plains after Sputnik, the world's first man-made satellite.

• Nasa's New Horizons Pluto images: What we've learned

• Pluto up close: Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft's flyby, in pictures

Spanning a couple hundred miles, the plains are located in the bright, heart-shaped area of Pluto. Like the mountains unveiled on Wednesday, the plains look to be a relatively young at around 100 million years old. Scientists speculate internal heating — perhaps from volcanoes or geysers— might be responsible for these youthful-looking, crater-free regions. The plains appear to include smooth hills and fields of small pits.




Principal scientist Alan Stern says the pictures coming from 3 billion miles (5 billion kilometers) away are "beautiful eye candy."

"This terrain is not easy to explain," said Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

There are two theories being considered. Perhaps the plains were shaped by the contraction of surface materials, similar to what happens when mud dries, said NASA.

• 12 facts about Pluto everyone should know

Or, they could be formed by a process called convection, where by some kind of heat from Pluto's interior reshapes the surface layer of frozen carbon monoxide, methane and nitrogen.

"These are the early days of a close encounter analysis," said Moore.

"As extraordinary and provocative as these images are, we are in the most preliminary stages of our investigations. We are still entertaining the widest range of hypotheses. We are acutely aware that jumping to conclusions leads to great peril."

• Pluto flyby - as it happened: First pictures show dwarf planet is red like Mars

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft zipped by Pluto on Tuesday, marking the first time in history that humankind has explored the distant dwarf planet.

The nuclear-powered spaceship traveled for nearly 10 years and three billion (4.8 billion kilometers) to reach Pluto, and now it is moving deeper into the Kuiper Belt region of space.

 

[AZADPAKISTAN2009]

beautiful planet again no water ... which makes one wonder , how did earth get its oceans ? Something gigantic and rich source of water must have hit earth in past

 

[Fenrir]

beautiful planet again no water ... which makes one wonder , how did earth get its oceans ?

Pluto may very well have water (we should wait for further studying of the info being brought in by New Horizons, discoveries are often overturned upon further examination), but not liquid water. Oceans form only when sufficient pressures or temperatures allow for them.

New Pluto images reveal vast water deposits

*Begin tangent:

Coincidentally, one can also get "warm ice" - or water so compressed that it becomes solid without actually freezing, but this isn't seen under normal conditions and may only exist on "water worlds" - at this point it's hypothetical.

Ice VII (ice-seven)

*End tangent:

Liquid hydrogen exists as a warm sea on Jupiter

A Freaky Fluid inside Jupiter?

And is created via extreme pressure on other larger planets... some of the largest have "liquid diamond" cores.

Diamond Oceans Possible on Uranus, Neptune

Highly compressed liquids are one reasons (alongside radioactive decay, atmospheric friction and other currently unknown effects) Neptune, who average external temperature is 73 K (-200 Celsius), see's the planet radiate more thermal energy than it receives from the Sun.

Temperature of Neptune

Pluto, being 3,670,050,000 miles (5,906,380,000 kilometers) from the sun has an average temperature of:

At its warmest, when it is closest to the sun, Pluto can reach temperatures of minus 369 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 223 degrees Celsius). At its coolest, temperatures can fall to minus 387 degrees F (minus 233 C)

How Cold is Pluto?

How far is Pluto from the Sun?

That's insufficent to heat ice into a liquid.

Pluto's surface pressure is ~3 microbar, again this is too low to compress gases into liquids, as seen on large planets like Neptune and Jupiter.

Pluto Fact Sheet

Something gigantic and rich source of water must have hit earth in past

Early Earth was in a mine-field of debris, following the coalescence of its own into what is now Earth and prior to the formation of the Moon, comet and asteroid bombardment was a regular occurrence.

How Did Water Come to Earth?

The same asteroids and comets that brought the chemicals needed to create proteins, also brought the necessities for water:

Scientist Suggests Comet and Meteorite Impacts Made Life on Earth Possible

Of course Earth's "Goldilocks" position in space helped in its acquiring of life by providing a "habitable zone" that was neither too hot nor too cold for life's formation.

The Goldilocks Zone

Pluto is much too cold to sustain human-like life, though some extremophiles could propagate in the harsh, cold and atmospherics deficient qualities of Pluto.

What is an extremophile?

Water in the form of ice, but not liquid oceans.

 

[AZADPAKISTAN2009]

Pluto looks more like earth then mars does