{"id":16173,"date":"2015-07-18T18:19:07","date_gmt":"2015-07-18T10:19:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/fly-over-plutos-newly-explored-surfaces\/"},"modified":"2015-07-18T18:19:07","modified_gmt":"2015-07-18T10:19:07","slug":"fly-over-plutos-newly-explored-surfaces","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/fly-over-plutos-newly-explored-surfaces\/","title":{"rendered":"Fly over Pluto\u2019s newly-explored surfaces"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"678\" height=\"381\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ydU-YrG_INk?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Using three images beamed back to Earth from the New Horizons spacecraft\u2019s long-range camera, scientists created this jaw-dropping animation of what it might look like to buzz Pluto from 25 miles up.<\/p>\n<p>The animation includes two flyover scenes, first of a series of craggy ice mountains stretching more than two miles above their surrounding terrain. Scientists have informally named the mountain range \u201cNorgay Montes\u201d after Tenzing Norgay, the Nepalese sherpa who accompanied mountaineer Edmund Hillary on the first recorded summit of Mount Everest.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat you\u2019re seeing is a scene that\u2019s about a total width about 250 miles across \u2014 400 kilometers,\u201d said Alan Stern, New Horizons\u2019 principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute. \u201cThese mountains soar as high above their local terrain as many of the mountains in the Rocky Mountains do here in the United States. \u201cPretty impressive.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The second scene in the flyover is of Sputnik Planum, an enigmatic region near Norgay Montes covered with blocks of ice up to 20 miles across made of frozen carbon monoxide, and perhaps nitrogen and methane. Scientists are not sure what caused the shapes to form, but the ice field may come from convection bubbling up from Pluto\u2019s warmer subsurface.<\/p>\n<p>The flyover \u201cgives you a feel for the scale of the fetaures that you\u2019re looking at \u2014 really beautiful surfaces \u2014 and we\u2019re going to be seeing a lot more of this,\u201d Stern said. \u201cThis is 400 meters (1,300-foot) per pixel imagery. By next week, we\u2019ll have more than twice as much as the three frames we\u2019ve already been able to share.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The three pictures sent to the ground as of Friday are just a sampling of hundreds of black-and-white and color images stored aboard New Horizons\u2019 two solid-state data recorders.<\/p>\n<p><b><i>Email the author.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n<p><em><strong>Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Using three images beamed back to Earth from the New Horizons spacecraft\u2019s long-range camera, scientists created this jaw-dropping animation of what it might look like to buzz Pluto from 25 miles up. The animation includes two flyover scenes, first of a series of craggy ice mountains stretching more than two miles above their surrounding terrain. [&hellip;]<\/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-16173","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\/16173"}],"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=16173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16173\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}