- New Horizons, the NASA probe
that flew by Pluto in July
is finally sending us
the most detailed images
of the dwarf planet that it took.
As Alan Stern, the project's
principal investigator said,
"The science we can do with these images
"is simply unbelievable."
Everything we know about Pluto
is really an educated guess,
born from data we've
been collecting from afar
ever since Clyde Tombaugh
discovered it in 1930.
Like really afar though.
Pluto's elliptical orbit
takes it from a mere
28.7 astronomical units away
from Earth at its closest
to almost twice as
distant at its farthest,
50.1 astronomical units,
or like 4.7 billion miles.
But New Horizons passed closer than
ten thousand miles to Pluto's surface,
using a telescopic instrument called
the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager,
or LORRI for short.
The probe captured images
that reveal landscape features
less than half the size of a city block.
Some of these features
reinforce what researchers
already suspected about Pluto.
For example, crumbled
ridges seen in the mountains
along the shoreline of the Sputnik Planum
suggest these mountains
are huge blocks of ice,
some towering more than
a mile above the surface
that have jammed and jostled
into their current configuration.
Other images divulge entirely new glimpses
into Pluto's past.
We can now see distinct layers
inside the walls of some craters,
which will help scientists dig into
the dwarf planet's geological history.
Still other details will give us clues
into the current conditions on the surface
and in the atmosphere.
These pits spangling a
section of the famous
heart shaped Tombaugh Regio
are unmarred by impact craters,
meaning they probably
formed fairly recently.
Their alignment has mission
scientists speculating
that they formed through a combination
of ice flow fractures and the evaporation
of volatable materials like nitrogen,
evaporating into the atmosphere.
Aside from giving me a lot of feelings,
these images will take
a lot of the guesswork
out of our study of Pluto,
which in turn will teach
us more than ever before
about the history of
our whole solar system,
and allow us to make more educated guesses
about star systems beyond too.
This one has me a little bit clamped.
What do you hope future
NASA missions will bring?
Get in touch.
Let us know.
And check back in with
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for more science happening now.
You know, later.
