NASA releases images showing the best close-up views of Pluto yet
Scientific wonder ... more photos have emerged of Pluto’s incredible surface. Picture: NASA
- Shoba Rao
- News Corp Australia Network
NASA has unveiled the best close-up views of Pluto’s surface that humans may see for years to come.
The images were taken on a recent flyby courtesy of
NASA’s
New Horizons spacecraft on July 14.
The spacecraft, described by NASA as “piano-sized”, transmitted data stored on its digital recorders from its flight through the Pluto system.
The images have resolutions of about 77-85 metres per pixel — revealing features less than half the size of a city block on Pluto’s diverse surface.
Together, the images form a strip 80 kilometres wide on a world three billion miles away.
An array of cratered, mountainous and glacial terrains can be seen in the images, which carry clear views of the planet.
Sharp images ... a photo of the al-Idrisi mountains reveal Pluto’s water-ice crust. Picture: NASA
Source:Supplied
“These close-up images, showing the diversity of terrain on Pluto, demonstrate the power of our robotic planetary explorers to return intriguing data to scientists back here on planet Earth,” said John Grunsfeld, former astronaut and associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
Fine detail ... the planet’s cratered surface, which shows the layers in many of Pluto’s craters on its surface. Picture: NASA
Source:Supplied
The pictures come from Pluto’s horizon, which is 800 kilometres northwest of the informally named Sputnik Planum, across the al-Idrisi mountains, over the shoreline of Sputnik, and across its icy plains.
“Impact craters are nature’s drill rigs, and the new, highest-resolution pictures of the bigger craters seem to show that Pluto’s icy crust, at least in places, is distinctly layered,” said William McKinnon, deputy lead of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team.
“Looking into Pluto’s depths is looking back into geological time, which will help us piece together Pluto’s geological history.”
New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern was impressed by the spacecraft’s ability to transmit such clear, detailed images so quickly.
What’s left ... Pluto’s surface characterised by years of erosion and faulting as time has gone by.
Source:Supplied
“These new images give us a breathtaking, super-high resolution window into Pluto’s geology,” Mr Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado said.
“Nothing of this quality was available for Venus or Mars until decades after their first flybys; yet at Pluto we’re there already — down among the craters, mountains and ice fields — less than five months after flyby! The science we can do with these images is simply unbelievable.”
http://www.news.com.au/technology/s...t/news-story/742cbc3ba772833cddd9a1a37e95eeb5
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That poor, poor kid is going to have to grow thick skin later on in life with a name like that.
