Wow! Look at Pluto with all the dunes, nitrogen ice flowing out of mountainous regions, and valleys!
Is it Pluto’s turn now? Mars has been explored and studied in detail before.
The new close-up pictures of Pluto which the NASA’s New Horizon spacecraft has got along with it to India show a mind-boggling range of features available on the planet surface and in its atmosphere.
New features:
The pictures show us features like dunes, nitrogen ice flowing out of mountainous regions, and valleys were carved out by material flowing over Pluto’s surface.
What else:
You can also see the oldest and heavily cratered terrain in the picture.
“New images also show the most heavily cratered — and thus oldest — terrain yet seen by New Horizons on Pluto next to the youngest, most crater-free icy plains. There might even be a field of dark wind-blown dunes, among other possibilities,” added NASA.
About the New Horizons spacecraft:
New Horizons is an interplanetary space probe that was launched as part of NASA’s New Frontiers program. Engineered by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), with a team led by S. Alan Stern, the spacecraft was launched to study Pluto, its moons and the Kuiper belt, performing flybys of the Pluto system and one or more other Kuiper belt objects (KBOs)
It is now more than three billion miles away from the Earth’s surface.
It is the first- ever space mission to explore Pluto. It was able to click the pictures while passing Pluto on July 12, 2015.
Quote- Unquote:
“The surface of Pluto is every bit as complex as that of Mars,” said Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.
“The randomly jumbled mountains might be huge blocks of hard water ice floating within a vast, denser, softer deposit of frozen nitrogen within the region informally named Sputnik Planum.”