{"id":16188,"date":"2015-07-14T18:38:09","date_gmt":"2015-07-14T10:38:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/scientists-wowed-by-new-views-of-psychedelic-pluto\/"},"modified":"2015-07-14T18:38:09","modified_gmt":"2015-07-14T10:38:09","slug":"scientists-wowed-by-new-views-of-psychedelic-pluto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/scientists-wowed-by-new-views-of-psychedelic-pluto\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists wowed by new views of \u2018psychedelic\u2019 Pluto"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"678\" height=\"381\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/kDAM0CJd6OA?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Pluto and its Texas-sized moon Charon share an alien environment on the solar system\u2019s outer frontier, with patches of organic ices and diverse rock types illustrated in color imagery released Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking hours after NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft zoomed 7,700 miles from Pluto on the first-ever encounter with the mystery world, scientists said early images show remarkable diversity across Pluto\u2019s surface.<\/p>\n<p>The images yield new insights on the distant dwarf\u2019s composition, a teaser before more refined data on Pluto\u2019s mineral makeup arrives back on Earth later this week.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFrom the ground, we knew that there were a lot different colors on Pluto, but we never imagined anything like this,\u201d said Cathy Olkin, New Horizons\u2019 deputy project scientist from the Southwest Research Institute.<\/p>\n<p>Olkin said Pluto appeared \u201cpsychedelic\u201d in color.<\/p>\n<p>While Pluto\u2019s appearance in recent New Horizons photos approximates what the human eye would see, the false color image exaggerates different shades of Pluto\u2019s rust-colored crust, allowing scientists to dig deeper into the geology of the faraway outpost.<\/p>\n<p>The Ralph instrument on NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft captured the color data as the probe flew inbound toward Pluto on Monday.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis is an aesthetic moment as much as it is a science moment,\u201d said Jeff Moore, geology and geophysics team lead at NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center. \u201cHaving been a reader of science fiction and an admirer of space art, I don\u2019t believe that even the best space artist in the world could make a painting as beautiful as this. This is nature outdoing us.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The color imagery shows a brilliant heart-shaped marking appears to be divided into two compositional sections with a clear line separating the units.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe heart actually is two different beasts,\u201d Moore said. \u201cThe west half of the heart, which is on the left-hand side, is smooth. We think it might actually be smooth, although we can\u2019t be completely sure.\u201d<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_7680\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-7680\" style=\"width: 620px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-7680\" src=\"http:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/nh-071315_falsecolorcomposite.jpg\" alt=\"This July 13, 2015, image of Pluto and Charon is presented in false colors to make differences in surface material and features easy to see. It was obtained by the Ralph instrument on NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, using three filters to obtain color information, which is exaggerated in the image.  These are not the actual colors of Pluto and Charon, and the apparent distance between the two bodies has been reduced for this side-by-side view. Credit: NASA\/JHUAPL\/SWRI\" width=\"620\" height=\"349\" srcset=\"https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/nh-071315_falsecolorcomposite.jpg 1041w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/nh-071315_falsecolorcomposite-300x169.jpg 300w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/nh-071315_falsecolorcomposite-768x432.jpg 768w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/nh-071315_falsecolorcomposite-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/nh-071315_falsecolorcomposite-678x381.jpg 678w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 620px) 100vw, 620px\"><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-7680\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">This July 13, 2015, image of Pluto and Charon is presented in false colors to make differences in surface material and features easy to see. It was obtained by the Ralph instrument on NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft, using three filters to obtain color information, which is exaggerated in the image. These are not the actual colors of Pluto and Charon, and the apparent distance between the two bodies has been reduced for this side-by-side view. Credit: NASA\/JHUAPL\/SWRI<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>The images from New Horizons beamed back to Earth late Monday came down as compressed files, so scientists are not sure what features might actually be image artifacts.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHopefully, the pictures we\u2019ll get back tomorrow will show whether there is, in fact, topography and texture in this region or not,\u201d Moore said.<\/p>\n<p>One thing the color imagery seems to rule out is a uniform veneer of soil and dust over large swaths of Pluto\u2019s surface. Instead, scientists see discrete geologic units.<\/p>\n<p>The false color data \u201cshow it\u2019s not just a general layer of dirt over everything,\u201d said John Spencer, a New Horizons co-investigator from the Southwest Research Institute. \u201cThere\u2019s an enormous variety in the kinds of colors of the terrain, and they do seem to correlate with the geology.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Some areas of Pluto are devoid of craters, and Moore said some craters appear to be cut in half, evidence ancient impact sites have been altered or eroded through some kind of geologic process.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe think at least some regions on Pluto are relatively ancient,\u201d Moore said. \u201cThey\u2019re probably several billion years old. Other places where we see no craters at all are very young and perhaps are still currently undergoing geological evolution.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSome process either sweeps it clean or makes new stuff,\u201d Moore said.<\/p>\n<p>Pluto\u2019s equator, seen at the bottom of New Horizons\u2019 images, is home to a belt of dark markings. On the face of Pluto seen during Tuesday\u2019s flyby, Pluto\u2019s heart feature crosses over the dark band, but geologists are not sure how to interpret the region\u2019s appearance.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe think the dark material is cooked up in Pluto\u2019s atmosphere and deposited,\u201d Spencer said. \u201cWe don\u2019t know why it\u2019s deposited on the equator preferentially.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Stereo imagery due to come to Earth in the next few days will help unravel topography across the heart region and the envelope of dark material around it. Scientists said the 3D images will help create a digital elevation model of much of Pluto\u2019s hemisphere best observed by New Horizons.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_7683\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-7683\" style=\"width: 620px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-7683\" src=\"http:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/spencer_pluto.jpg\" alt=\"New Horizons scientist John Spencer inspects a poster print of the mission's latest Pluto image Tuesday. Credit: Stephen Clark\/Spaceflight Now\" width=\"620\" height=\"367\" srcset=\"https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/spencer_pluto.jpg 620w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/spencer_pluto-300x178.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 620px) 100vw, 620px\"><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-7683\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">New Horizons scientist John Spencer inspects a poster print of the mission\u2019s latest Pluto image Tuesday. Credit: Stephen Clark\/Spaceflight Now<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Each pixel in the stretched color image of Pluto is about 18 miles (30 kilometers) across, and the true color photo from New Horizons\u2019 long-range camera has a resolution of approximately 2.5 miles (4 kilometers).<\/p>\n<p>The sharpest imagery from the flyby will have a resolution more than 50 times better.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cRight now, we don\u2019t really know if (the heart region) is higher or lower than its surroundings,\u201d Spencer said. \u201cI get the impression that it\u2019s lower, but stereo (images) will come in, and just getting high-resolution will really help with that.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Spencer said the the first taste of New Horizons\u2019 imagery offers revelations for Pluto scientists.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe knew there was a big bright spot here because we could see it with the Hubble Space Telescope pictures,\u201d Spencer said. \u201cIt was just a big bright blob, but you could tell it was there, so the overall distribution of the terrains and contrast of them is something we had some warning of.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI don\u2019t think we had appreciated how well those dark terrains wrapped around the equator in a discrete band that\u2019s interrupted here,\u201d Spencer said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPluto\u2019s got a lot of stuff going on,\u201d Moore said. \u201cWe\u2019ve tried to be cautious, and I think we\u2019re just completely amazed by what a really diverse place this is, and it\u2019s going to take some work to sort this out.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>A fresh estimate of Pluto\u2019s size made by New Horizons\u2019 science team also tells researchers a little about the icy dwarf\u2019s atmosphere.<\/p>\n<p>New Horizons was programmed to profile the tenuous atmosphere cocooning Pluto \u2014 which has about one hundred thousandth the pressure of Earth\u2019s \u2014 on the outbound leg of Tuesday\u2019s encounter. Data from those observations will not be available for at least a few days, said Randy Gladstone, head of the mission\u2019s atmospheric science team from the Southwest Research Institute.<\/p>\n<p>Gladstone said the atmospheric scientists have to get used to \u201cdelayed gratification\u201d as data trickles down from New Horizons over the next few months.<\/p>\n<p>But Pluto\u2019s size, refined to a diameter of approximately 1,472 miles (2,370 kilometers), sets a bound on the thickness of the lowest, thickest layer of its atmosphere.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat settles the question,\u201d Gladstone said. \u201cIt\u2019s a fairly shallow atmosphere. It means a lot of the struture of the atmosphere is very well defined now. All the weather and stuff, and any hazes that we see, are going to be concentrated in that area and the winds that blow across the surface.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Charon, the often-forgotten sister world to Pluto, has its own, much older story to tell.<\/p>\n<p>It is blanketed with craters, a sign Charon\u2019s crust dates back billions of years. A giant chasm pictured on Charon may have developed as Charon cooled and shrunk soon after its formation, creating cracks and faults along its outer shell.<\/p>\n<p>Scientists believe Charon formed after a collision between Pluto and a giant interloper.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_7684\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-7684\" style=\"width: 620px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-7684\" src=\"http:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/7-13-15_Charon_image_NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI.png\" alt=\"Pluto's moon Charon, seen here in true color, has a dark, red-tinted feature on its north pole. Credit: NASA\/JHUAPL\/SWRI\" width=\"620\" height=\"620\" srcset=\"https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/7-13-15_Charon_image_NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI.png 1600w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/7-13-15_Charon_image_NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/7-13-15_Charon_image_NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI-300x300.png 300w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/7-13-15_Charon_image_NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI-768x768.png 768w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/7-13-15_Charon_image_NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI-1024x1024.png 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 620px) 100vw, 620px\"><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-7684\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Pluto\u2019s moon Charon, seen here in true color, has a dark, red-tinted feature on its north pole. Credit: NASA\/JHUAPL\/SWRI<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>A crude color map of Pluto\u2019s moon Charon shows a vast dark marking near the north pole has a reddish hue, likely confirming a hypothesis that Charon\u2019s frigid poles harbor deposits of frozen material trapped there as it streamed off of Pluto\u2019s atmosphere.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPluto\u2019s atmosphere is slowly leaking out into space and escaping, and as that drifts past the satellite, it can be temporarily trapped in ballistic trajectories hopping around the surface of the satellite (Charon),\u201d said Will Grundy, an astronomer from Lowell Observatory.<\/p>\n<p>Grundy said the atmospheric particles seem to be irradiated by solar radiation, forming a type of organic aerosol called tholins, which are normally reddish and appear on the icy moons of the gas giants in the outer solar system.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe surface (of Charon) is too warm for it to stick, but if it hops around to the polar winter night side, it can stick,\u201d Grundy said. \u201cSo you accumulate a bunch of escaped Pluto atmosphere, and then it\u2019s processed by the energetic radiation in space and makes this class of material that we call tholins.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>According to Grundy\u2019s theory, Charon catches the atmospheric gas flowing away from Pluto, and the aerosols can be trapped and frozen on the moon\u2019s poles when mired in winter, which runs for decades in Pluto and Charon\u2019s orbit around the sun.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019ve been looking at this dark polar spot for a long time, and sure enough, it is quite red,\u201d said Grundy. \u201cAnd the reason I said sure enough is because an idea has been bouncing around the science team for a couple of weeks now for a mechanism to do that, so it\u2019s gratifying to see that it is, in fact, red.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Tuesday\u2019s make-or-break flyby only saw one side of Pluto up close, catching the world at one point in its 6.4-day rotation. New Horizons\u2019 images of Pluto\u2019s opposite hemisphere, which showed intriguing evenly-spaced dark splotches scattered across its equator, are much lower-quality.<\/p>\n<p>Moore said he was happy with the section of Pluto encountered by New Horizons.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOf course, if we could really change the laws of physics, we\u2019d have the spacecraft make another pass in three days, and we\u2019d see it.\u201d<\/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>Pluto and its Texas-sized moon Charon share an alien environment on the solar system\u2019s outer frontier, with patches of organic ices and diverse rock types illustrated in color imagery released Tuesday. Speaking hours after NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft zoomed 7,700 miles from Pluto on the first-ever encounter with the mystery world, scientists said early images [&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":[2172,4002,2174,2848],"class_list":["post-16188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-charon","tag-flyby","tag-new-horizons","tag-pluto"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16188"}],"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=16188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16188\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}