Farthest Geologic Map

The Kuiper Belt Object Pluto was visited and photographed last year by the New Horizons Spacecraft as it flew by the icy world. When geologists get pictures of a new solid object, they immediately start grouping features together based on similar compositions, textures, or behaviors, and then they draw lines between them.

Until New Horizons flies by another Kuiper Belt Object in a few years, this area is the farthest spot from Earth with a Geologic Map.

This frame covers the left half of the “Heart” feature on Pluto, informally named Tombaugh Regio.

The spacecraft captured multi-spectral information across this region, so scientists will be able to analyze some of the compositions in this area. However, at present, most of the boundaries are defined based on textural terms, among them including “Rubbly”, “Cratered”, “Ridged”, “Plateau”, “Plains”, and “Uplands.”

-JBB

Image credit: NASA/JHUAPL https://www.nasa.gov/feature/putting-pluto-s-geology-on-the-map

One more ridiculous Pluto flyover video for today. This one is right on the edge of the “Heart” feature where the flat plain gives way to a series of rugged hills.

With continued downloaded images from the New Horizons spacecraft, NASA released this amazing flyover video showing Pluto in enhanced color - different colors indicate different surface compositions. 

Newly-processed, HD, color video of what pulling away from Pluto looked like to the New Horizons spacecraft.

Pluto’s Ice Volcanoes

It has been four months since NASA’s New Horizons mission passed Pluto, and scientists are still analysing the wealth of information obtained from this successful flyby. Recently, New Horizon geologists have been assessing images and 3D maps of an area in the south polar region on Pluto’s surface. Here lay two incredibly large geological features, one 2 miles high, the other 3.5 miles high, that span several miles across. Both mountains appear to have a hole in their summit, indicating volcanoes. However, while Earth’s volcanoes spew molten rock due to the internal heat source of the planet, it is expected that Pluto’s volcanoes emit a slurry of ice, nitrogen, methane or ammonia from its mantle. If this is true, it can reveal a lot about the geological and atmospheric processes occurring on planets in the outer solar system.

Before the flyby, it was thought that Pluto might have been too small to power geological processes such as volcanism and glacier flows. The discovery of these two potential cryovolcanoes, informally named Wright Mons and Piccard Mons, are the first of their kind in the solar system so far. Saturn’s frozen moon, Enceladus, in known to spew material from its south pole, but this is from a fissure rather than a volcanic feature. It is also hypothesised that Titan, another of Saturn’s moons, exhibits cryovolcanism, but this is still under debate.

Scientists are able to estimate the age of the surface area of a planet by counting crater impacts. A surface area with a lot of crater impacts is likely to be up to 4 billion years old, not long after the formation of the planets. An area which has been dubbed the Sputnik Planum on the left side of the “heart” that appears on Pluto’s surface has surprised scientists, showing little or no evidence for impact craters. This means that the area has formed only in the last 10 million years, which in geological terms is brand new. This further demonstrates geological activity on Pluto’s surface, showing that Pluto’s processes have been greatly underestimated. It may be a dwarf planet, but it seems that it is still mighty.

-GG

Sources: http://go.nasa.gov/1Yc02lm http://bit.ly/1NH5lX8 http://bit.ly/1N53Oew

Image: http://bit.ly/1H3dV1d

This image of Pluto and Charon released by NASA today shows them edited such that they both are shown at the same brightness. Charon is clearly darker in the shot, which means that Charon is actually darker. Note how the reddish colored material near Pluto’s equator also seems to match the reddish material near Charon’s poles. This is probably telling us they’re the same material; what that material is we’ll need to wait for better spectra to say.

Otherworldy Nunataks

The more we explore our Solar System, the more glacial features seem to resemble each other no matter what the temperature or the material involved. Glacial features have probably been found on Mars, and Europa and Enceladus have unique and interesting surface activity. But way out at the edge of the solar system there seems to be a landscape where the bedrock is water ice, and the glaciers are made of frozen nitrogen. I speak of course of Pluto, the last planet in the solar system (or whatever you want to call it) to be visited by our exploratory probes. A sea of fresh uncratered ice enfolds the bedrock, producing a feature very familiar from our terrestrial ice sheets.

The word nunatak is a word borrowed from an Inuit term that is used in geomorphology (the study of landscapes, how they come to be and how they evolve) to describe a lump of bedrock sticking out of an ice sheet, usually a mountain top. They are common on Earth, and apparently right at the other end of the solar system as well.

Loz

Image credit: NASA

http://slate.me/1EQFNV9

This video was created by Google executive Clay Bavor. It is a simulation showing how fast clouds move when seen out the window of a standard 747 aircraft, an SR-71 aircraft, and how fast they’d seem to be moving if you were moving at the speed the New Horizons spacecraft had when it flew past Pluto.

Neat animation using data from New Horizons that stitches together what the view of Pluto would probably have been like for the spacecraft as it actually flew by.

An other wordly glacier

Our rivers of flowing ice are made up of frozen flowing water, but in this amazing image snapped by NASA's New Horizons probe as it streamed at high speed past Pluto reveals how nature can produce similar patterns in very different circumstances and using different elements. On Pluto, the bedrock is made of water ice, while the flowing matter moving around obstacles and filling depressions in the image is nitrogen (which at Earth temperature makes up most of our atmosphere) with a whiff perhaps of methane. The style of flow between these two elements found at opposite ends of our solar system in widely different temperature zones is very similar, illustrating how the laws of physics give different materials varying consistencies and responses to stress in very diverse environments, but that many essential patterns in nature remain the same.

Loz

Image credit: http://bit.ly/1S0cBAS

NASA also released this composite video of flying over Pluto today. This one shows the icy plains and the contrast with the mountains (they named the range the Hillary Mountains after Sir. Edmund Hillary, part of the first group to climb Everest). Also note the light of the Milky Way rising in the background during the flyby. 

Dark side of the Dwarf Planet

After it made its closest approach to Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft’s trajectory took it on a path that passed directly behind Pluto, into its shadow and with Pluto between the Sun and the spacecraft.

That maneuver allowed the spacecraft to directly measure Pluto’s atmospheric composition and density, using the sunlight that was passing through the atmosphere as a probe of its thickness.

The spacecraft also caught this image of Pluto’s dark side as it headed out. The light coming to the camera is being bent through the gas in Pluto’s atmosphere

Just an amazing shot.

-JBB

Image credit: NASA/New Horizons/JHUAPL/SWRI http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/pluto-s-breathtaking-farewell-to-new-horizons

“Space Weather’ can be an issue for spacecraft as electrical discharges from the sun can cause electronic issues for spacecraft. They can also be measured by spacecraft, allowing us to see how the electronic environment of our solar system changes as the sun spits out various pulses of solar wind and Coronal Mass Ejections. This simulation shows how those pulses evolve as they move out towards the outer solar system, Pluto, and the New Horizons spacecraft. And it’s just ridiculously hypnotic.

Look up to the skies and see

In case you weren’t watching today’s New Horizons Press Conference, the NASA Mission team had a fun visitor today. That’s Dr. Brian May, who completed his PhD in astrophysics in 2007, talking with Dr. Charles Bolden, current NASA Administrator and former astronaut. Brian May of course may be slightly better known for his contributions as the guitar player of the band “Queen” than for his contributions to astrophysics, but the combination probably made him an interesting conversation partner on this visit to the New Horizons and NASA operation facilities today.

Oh and they also released a bunch of new photos and even a 3-D Flyover video of Pluto today while they were at it (http://tmblr.co/Zyv2Js1ppWGKz).

-JBB

Image credit: NASA https://flic.kr/p/vRrwM3

What’s that, you want to fly over Pluto from that last video in Gif form? Here’s your chance! Flying over Pluto in Gif!