{"id":16354,"date":"2015-04-29T22:36:11","date_gmt":"2015-04-29T14:36:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/surface-markings-show-up-in-newest-pluto-imagery\/"},"modified":"2015-04-29T22:36:11","modified_gmt":"2015-04-29T14:36:11","slug":"surface-markings-show-up-in-newest-pluto-imagery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/surface-markings-show-up-in-newest-pluto-imagery\/","title":{"rendered":"Surface markings show up in newest Pluto imagery"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Images
Images of Pluto and its moon Charon taken by New Horizons from April 12-18 show the dwarf planet\u2019s rotation and orbital motion. Credit: NASA\/JHU-APL\/SwRI<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Alan Stern, chief scientist on NASA\u2019s New Horizons mission, said Wednesday he had an emotional \u201cmeet Pluto moment\u201d when new imagery from the faraway space probe arrived on Earth showing the mysterious world in more detail than ever before seen by human eyes.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese images are just a little bit better than anything that\u2019s been obtained in history,\u201d Stern said in a conference call with reporters Wednesday unveiling fresh views of Pluto and its moon Charon.<\/p>\n

The two worlds are locked in a cosmic dance, with the Texas-sized moon Charon tugging at Pluto as it flies around the bigger planet.<\/p>\n

The imagery released Wednesday show bright and dark splotches on Pluto, and an animation reveals the motion of Pluto\u2019s rotation around its pole and the track of Charon in orbit. Pluto is tilted on its side from the perspective of New Horizons, so one of the icy world\u2019s poles is pointed at the approaching space probe.<\/p>\n

\u201cImagine Pluto on its side, you\u2019re looking down essentially on the pole, and it\u2019s rotating before us like a chicken on a barbecue spit, an almost perpendicular rotation to our line of sight,\u201d said Stern, a researcher based at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. \u201cThose features are real features on the surface of Pluto, seen for the first time by the New Horizons spacecraft.\u201d<\/p>\n

The New Horizons spacecraft\u2019s long-range telescopic camera took the black-and-white images in mid-April at a range of less than 70 million miles from its target, and experts processed the raw imagery to tease out additional information on Pluto\u2019s surface features.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re just crossing the boundary where were able to do new science with images like this,\u201d Stern said. \u201cWhat they confirm for us is the strong albedo (reflectivity) differences across Pluto\u2019s surface that were first detected by Hubble around 20 years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stern described broad surface markings spotted by New Horizons on Pluto\u2019s surface for the first time.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are structures hundreds of miles across that are coherently rotating around the equatorial zone,\u201d Stern said. \u201cThe images always remain bright at the 3 o\u2019clock position. That\u2019s the pole, and that may be evidence for a polar cap and that would be very, very exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n

The bright reflections could be from an ice sheet at the pole. Spectroscopic observations from Earth-based telescopes show solid evidence Pluto contains three types of ices: frozen nitrogen, carbon dioxide and methane.<\/p>\n

The nuclear-powered New Horizons spacecraft \u2014 about the size and shape of a grand piano \u2014 will be close enough to Pluto in the coming months to confirm the presence of a polar ice cap.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor now, we can only say that it\u2019s very suspiciously suggestive of a polar cap,\u201d Stern said. \u201cBut we need that compositional data to really determine that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"New
New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern holds a model of the spacecraft during a press briefing at NASA Headquarters on April 14. Credit: NASA\/Joel Kowsky<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

New Horizons will get better views as it barrels toward Pluto, heading for a one-shot flyby 7,800 miles from the dwarf planet\u2019s surface July 14. The encounter will be the first time a spacecraft has ever visited Pluto, which orbits more than 3 billion miles from the sun.<\/p>\n

Scientists look forward to seeing features on Pluto smaller than a city block during New Horizons\u2019s fleeting flyby in July.<\/p>\n

\u201cUltimately, we\u2019ll get everything (on Pluto) at least at some resolution,\u201d said Hal Weaver, the New Horizons mission scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, which operates the spacecraft for NASA.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe polar cap is a region that\u2019s normally a little bit colder than the rest of the surface and that\u2019s where these volatile ices can condense on the surface,\u201d Weaver told reporters Wednesday. \u201cThat\u2019s what we think we\u2019re seeing, but in the next month-and-a-half, we\u2019re going to actually map with 60,000 pixels across the surface, and so we\u2019ll be able to tell whether or not there\u2019s really ice \u2014 whether those brightest regions are really ice and snowy patches.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are guesses at this point, and that\u2019s the reason why we\u2019re doing this mission,\u201d Weaver added.<\/p>\n

The images distributed Wednesday are sharper than the best photos ever taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, officials said, and they mark the transition of Pluto and Charon an astronomical target visible only through powerful observatories to an object with apparent geologic and topographic diversity.<\/p>\n

The camera on New Horizons is still not as sensitive to faint objects as Hubble, so the speedy space probe has not yet detected Pluto\u2019s four tiny moons much smaller than Charon. New Horizons will look for more moons of Pluto over the next three months.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are not dots in the distance any longer,\u201d Stern said of Pluto and Charon. \u201cWe are now close to enough to resolve surface features.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Artist's
Artist\u2019s concept of the New Horizons spacecraft during the Pluto flyby. Credit: JHUAPL\/SWRI<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

New Horizons launched from Cape Canaveral in January 2006, becoming the fastest vehicle ever sent into space. The spacecraft crossed the orbit of the moon in 11 hours and reached Jupiter 13 months after launch for a gravity assist to swing its path toward Pluto.<\/p>\n

Stern, who has led the mission since NASA approved it in 2001, said he had a \u201cmeet Pluto moment\u201d when he saw the latest images from New Horizons.<\/p>\n

\u201cSeeing it go from a point of light to an actual place that we\u2019re approaching was actually a little bit emotional,\u201d Stern said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a planetary scientist, it\u2019s rare to see any planet in the solar system at this low resolution displaying such strong suface markings,\u201d Stern said. \u201cIf you had similar images of Mercury, or images of even Mars, for example, you would not see the same kinds of big surface units going by as you do here on Pluto. That\u2019s very proimisnig for the imagery as we get closer and closer. It\u2019s a mystery whether these bright and dark regions are caused by geology, by topography or by composition (variations).\u201d<\/p>\n

New Horizons will find out as it nears the July 14 flyby, when Pluto will more than fill the field-of-view of the probe\u2019s long-range camera and a color imager will take its own pictures.<\/p>\n

Scientists expect Pluto to have a reddish hue when New Horizons resolves the world\u2019s color, and the dark regions observed by New Horizons may be the signature of organic compounds, Weaver said<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve known from ground-based spectroscopy, as well as from recent images made in April that we returned from New Horizons, that Pluto\u2019s color is somewhat reddish \u2014 not a deep red but a light red \u2014 but very reflective,\u201d Stern said. \u201cOn the surface, there appears to be strong color gradients, different units with different colors.\u201d<\/p>\n

Weaver said the New Horizons probe\u2019s LORRI camera, which took the pictures released Wednesday, will begin daily observations of Pluto on May 28. Mission officials plan to release raw images of Pluto on a public website within 48 hours of their downlink to Earth.<\/p>\n

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

Images of Pluto and its moon Charon taken by New Horizons from April 12-18 show the dwarf planet\u2019s rotation and orbital motion. Credit: NASA\/JHU-APL\/SwRI Alan Stern, chief scientist on NASA\u2019s New Horizons mission, said Wednesday he had an emotional \u201cmeet Pluto moment\u201d when new imagery from the faraway space probe arrived on Earth showing the […]<\/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":[2884,2174,2848],"class_list":["post-16354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-alan-stern","tag-new-horizons","tag-pluto"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16354"}],"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=16354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16354\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}