Once again, scientists have found themselves surprised and amazed by Pluto, as the latest batch of information and images from the New Horizons spacecraft reveal that the dwarf planet has an odd, rippled landscape lined with craters filled with something that looks like pasta sauce.
According to National Geographic, the newest pictures reveal a rough, scalloped texture which NASA scientists say is reminiscent of dragon scales or tree bark, and in addition to the apparent sauce-filled craters, the US space agency also discovered pits that resemble Triton’s cantaloupe terrain and mountains that look as if they’re bleeding, the website said.
“It’s a unique and perplexing landscape stretching over hundreds of miles,” William McKinnon, the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team deputy lead from Washington University in St. Louis, said of the unusual dragon-scale terrain. He added that it could be “some combination of internal tectonic forces and ice sublimation driven by Pluto’s faint sunlight.”
This newly-released “color extended” image show a region of Pluto roughly 330 miles across along the dwarf planet’s day-night divide, according to Mashable. It was captured on July 14, during the probe’s closest approach to Pluto, and also depicts dune-like features, what appears to be the shoreline of a shrinking glacial ice lake, and fractured ice mountains with sheer cliffs.
Data reveals unusual methane patterns across the planet
The pictures, which were originally taken by New Horizons’ wide-angle Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC) and downlinked to Earth on September 19, reveals the dwarf planet’s unusually rich color palette, GGI deputy lead John Spencer from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado said in a statement.
The team used MVIC’s infrared channel “to extend our spectral view of Pluto,” he said. Then they enhanced Pluto’s surface colors “to reveal subtle details in a rainbow of pale blues, yellows, oranges, and deep reds. Many landforms have their own distinct colors, telling a wonderfully complex geological and climatological story that we have only just begun to decode.”
“With these just-downlinked images and maps, we’ve turned a new page in the study of Pluto, beginning to reveal the planet at high resolution in both color and composition,” added SwRI’s Alan Stern, principal investigator on the New Horizons mission. “I wish Pluto’s discoverer Clyde Tombaugh had lived to see this day.”
Data sent back to Earth by the probe also included methane maps that showed that while the region of the planet known as Sputnik Plaum has an abundance of methane, there is none of the gas in the relatively dark patch known as Cthulhu Regio. Thus far, methane been found on crater rims and in icy planes, but none has yet been detected in the middle of those craters, nor has there been any sign of the substance in the dwarf planet’s dark regions.
“It’s like the classic chicken-or-egg problem,” said New Horizons scientist Will Grundy. “We’re unsure why this is so, but the cool thing is that New Horizons has the ability to make exquisite compositional maps across the surface of Pluto, and that’ll be crucial to resolving how enigmatic Pluto works.”
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All images credit of NASA
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