The photos of Pluto return to satisfy scientific curiosity through the New Horizons spacecraft NASA. The new images reveal a more diverse than imagined experts before the probe passed close to Pluto in July landscape, the first time a spacecraft approaches the distant dwarf planet.
“If an artist had drawn the image of Pluto before our flyby, probably would have considered exaggerated, but that’s what’s there, “said Alan Stern, New Horizons scientific director of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.
In a photo, the darkened plains bordering ancient craters more recent frosts. Some scientists believe that dark ridges showing pictures may be dunes.
A geologist, William McKinnon of Washington University in St. Louis, said that if it comes runes would be “completely unusual” due to the thin atmosphere of the planetoid.
“O Pluto had a thicker atmosphere above, or the stakes some process unknown to us. It’s a puzzle,” said McKinnon, a specialist in outer space, on a written statement.
The mountainous mess, moreover, could represent huge blocks of ice floating on a tank of nitrogen ice cream.
After weeks of collecting data New Horizons, scientists began to combine new pictures of Pluto last weekend. The latest images were released Thursday.
In addition to the geological features, the images show that the haze surrounding Pluto not only has different layers but creates a twilight effect that allows New Horizons study places in the dark side that scientists never expected to see.
On Monday two months will encounter probe to Pluto on July 14 after a nine and a half years.
New Horizons Pluto collected so much data on it will take several months before registering everyone on Earth. The ship is operated from the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, Maryland, who also designed and built.
The next target for New Horizons, pending formal approval from NASA, will be a much smaller object orbiting 1,600 million kilometers (1,000 million kilometers) of Pluto, also in the Kuiper belt, a frigid zone within the confines of our solar system. PT1 is called, which in 2019 will be close.
No comments:
Post a Comment