A day after New Horizons first successful flyby, images have returned to us revealing ice mountains up to 11,000 ft high on Pluto’s surface. Absence of craters means that the surface is relatively young, no more than 100 million years old.
Photo taken Tuesday morning (Source: NASA)
Other images taken include this high res image of Charon, Pluto’s largest moon.
Source: NASA
According to NBCNews:
The scientists who are leading the team say even they are flummoxed by the images from an icy, alien realm on the edge of the solar system, 3 billion miles (5 billion kilometers) away.
“Who’d have supposed that there are ice mountains?” Johns Hopkins University’s Hal Weaver, project scientist for the New Horizons mission, said Wednesday during a news briefing here at JHU’s Applied Physics Laboratory.
The images were received overnight and analyzed by team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, just hours after the New Horizons probe sped past Pluto and its moons at more than 30,000 miles per hour. The probe came within 7,750 miles of Pluto’s surface, collecting data and taking pictures the entire way. It took all of the probe’s energy to collect the images, so the team lost contact until Pluto phoned home.
Mission managers said New Horizons is now loaded up with so much data that it will take 16 months to download it all. The spacecraft appears to be in good condition.
Also from NBC:
After all those pictures and data are sent back, the $728 million New Horizons mission could be extended to accommodate another flyby past an even more distant object in the Kuiper Belt, the region of icy objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. But for now, Stern (Principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute) and his colleagues are enjoying the first flush of discovery.
“I don’t think anyone of us could have imagined it would be this good of a toy store,” Stern said.
“This is what we came for,” Will Grundy, a member of the science team from Lowell Observatory, said in reply.
“This exceeds what we came for,” (Cathy) Olkin added.
This has been a landmark achievement for NASA and the world.
New name for Pluto's heart shaped surface - Hip Daily
Wednesday 15th of July 2015
[…] Among these were the ice mountains recently discovered. ice mountains […]