NASA’s New Horizons team has released new close-up images of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon. The images were taken by New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) instrument during the spacecraft’s July 14 flyby of the Pluto system.
This image of Pluto’s surface was taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft shortly before closest approach to the dwarf planet on July 14, 2015. The scene is about 130 miles (210 km) across. The Sun illuminates the scene from the left, and north is to the upper left. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.
One of the new high-resolution images shows a portion of Sputnik Planum, a smooth, icy plain in Pluto’s ‘frozen heart.’
The image reveals the plain’s cellular pattern as well as groups of strange pits and troughs, which are hundreds of feet across and tens of feet deep.
New Horizons team members think that this region is composed of exotic ices such as solid nitrogen.
They theorize that the pits and troughs are possibly formed by sublimation or evaporation of these ices. However, the reasons for the striking shapes and alignments of these features are a mystery.
“Pluto is weird, in a good way. The pits, and the way they’re aligned, provide clues about the ice flow and the exchange of volatiles between the surface and atmosphere, and the science team is working hard to understand what physical processes are at play here,” said New Horizons scientist Dr Hal Weaver, of Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
These high-resolution images of Charon’s surface were taken by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager on New Horizons shortly before closest approach on July 14, 2015. The image above resolves details as small as 340 yards (310 m). The scene at bottom is about 125 miles (200 km) across. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.
The new high-resolution image of Charon’s surface (upper image) shows the canyon system of Serenity Chasma and the smooth plains known as Vulcan Planum.
The expanded view of Vulcan Planum (bottom image) highlights a landscape reminiscent of lunar maria (volcanic plains on Earth’s Moon). However, while the lunar maria are made of basalt, these plains on Charon consist of water ice.
New Horizons is currently 3.15 billion miles (5.07 billion km) from Earth and 71.6 million miles (115.2 million km) beyond Pluto. It is healthy and all systems are operating normally.
