New Pluto Images from NASA’s New Horizons: It’s Complicated

[n2doc]

New close-up images of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft reveal a bewildering variety of surface features that have scientists reeling because of their range and complexity.

“Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we’ve seen in the solar system,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado. “If an artist had painted this Pluto before our flyby, I probably would have called it over the top — but that’s what is actually there.”

New Horizons began its yearlong download of new images and other data over the Labor Day weekend. Images downlinked in the past few days have more than doubled the amount of Pluto’s surface seen at resolutions as good as 400 meters (440 yards) per pixel. They reveal new features as diverse as possible dunes, nitrogen ice flows that apparently oozed out of mountainous regions onto plains, and even networks of valleys that may have been carved by material flowing over Pluto’s surface. They also show large regions that display chaotically jumbled mountains reminiscent of disrupted terrains on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa.

“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.”

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.



more

http://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-pluto-images-from-nasa-s-new-horizons-it-s-complicated

[longship]

1. And, as usual, Emily Lakdawalla breaks it down.

She is the official evangelist for the Planetary Society and she never fails.

Here is her Blog entry on these new pics:
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/09101452-pluto-new-horizons-browse.html

I highly recommend her Blog. Intelligent. Detailed. Plus, she is an awesome image analyst.

One of my daily science click-throughs.

Happy to R&K

[Qutzupalotl]

2. Thanks for that link! eom

[hunter]

3. These new uncompressed images are astonishing.

I think many people were expecting Pluto to be a little boring, something between Mercury and our own Moon in terms of interesting geological features.

In spite of it's small size, there's a lot of very interesting and yet-to be-explained features on Pluto.

[dixiegrrrrl]

4. Pluto says.........

[Imgur]()

[chknltl]

5. Earth responds:

Needed to show Fox-News viewers that Saddam Hussein didn't hide any WMD's there.

[progressoid]

6. Beautiful!