{"id":16150,"date":"2015-07-28T20:51:27","date_gmt":"2015-07-28T12:51:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/the-heart-of-pluto-in-high-resolution\/"},"modified":"2015-07-28T20:51:27","modified_gmt":"2015-07-28T12:51:27","slug":"the-heart-of-pluto-in-high-resolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/the-heart-of-pluto-in-high-resolution\/","title":{"rendered":"The heart of Pluto in high-resolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

The icy plains of Pluto resolved by NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft stretch as wide as Texas, enveloping mountain ranges and bizarre hilly outcrops in a mosaic revealing one lobe of the distant world\u2019s heart-shaped reservoir of exotic frozen carbon monoxide, nitrogen and methane.<\/p>\n

The mosaic, posted here with permission, was created by Marco Di Lorenzo and Ken Kremer using seven scenes captured by New Horizons\u2019 LORRI camera.<\/p>\n

The ice field is informally dubbed Sputnik Planum, after the first artificial satellite sent into orbit around Earth. It is part of a larger feature tentatively named Tombaugh Regio, honoring Clyde Tombaugh, the astronomer who discovered Pluto at Lowell Observatory in 1930.<\/p>\n

In the middle of Sputnik Planum, views from New Horizons\u2019 sharp-eyed black-and-white camera show blocks of ice delineated by dark troughs. The ice features, called \u201cpolygonal terrain\u201d by geologists, taper toward the northern edge of Sputnik Planum, where streaks in the ice appear to be flows wrapping around barrier islands near a boundary with more rugged terrain.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s pretty big,\u201d said William McKinnon, a co-investigator on the New Horizons mission from Washington University in St. Louis. \u201cIn fact, it\u2019s just about the size of the state of Texas, and all around the periphery, and in the center of Sputnik Planum, are geological wonders.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the top of the picture, it\u2019s really different,\u201d McKinnon said in a press briefing Friday. \u201cThere\u2019s a rugged landscape there \u2014 a degraded landscape \u2014 and to a geologist\u2019s eye looks like something that has been very deeply and extensively eroded. We can tell it\u2019s old as well because you can see, with your own eye, various impact craters of large size.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s really interesting to us is the actual interaction between the Sputnik Planum and this rugged terrain to the top,\u201d McKinnon said. \u201cIf you look carefully at the image, you can actually see a pattern that incidates the flow of viscous ice towards the scarp or cliff boundary of the rugged terrain. We call these stream lines. We interpret them to be just like glacial flow on the Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike glaciers on Earth, which are made of water ice, the ice flows on Pluto are likely made of a mixture of nitrogen ice, carbon monoxide ice and methane ice. Water ice at Pluto\u2019s temperatures, which are around minus 390 degrees Fahrenheit, is immobile and behaves like a rock, but other types of frozen material can move, according to McKinnon.<\/p>\n

Near the southern boundary of Sputnik Planum, the icy plain is bordered by two mountain rangers \u2014 Norgay Montes and Hillary Montes \u2014 named for Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary, the first two people to make a documented ascent of Mount Everest.<\/p>\n

Scientists say the peaks are composed primarily of water ice, and measurements of shadows extending from Norgay Montes show the range to stand up to 11,000 feet above the surrounding plain.<\/p>\n

A darker region on the bottom left of the mosaic, and near Pluto\u2019s equator, is called Cthulhu Regio. Scientists believe it is part of a much more ancient geological unit than Sputnik Planum.<\/p>\n

\"nh_kremer_dilorenzo_1\"
Credit: NASA\/JHUAPL\/SWRI\/Marco Di Lorenzo\/Ken Kremer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Email the author.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The icy plains of Pluto resolved by NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft stretch as wide as Texas, enveloping mountain ranges and bizarre hilly outcrops in a mosaic revealing one lobe of the distant world\u2019s heart-shaped reservoir of exotic frozen carbon monoxide, nitrogen and methane. The mosaic, posted here with permission, was created by Marco Di Lorenzo […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2174,2848],"class_list":["post-16150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-new-horizons","tag-pluto"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16150"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16150\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}