[kellyhound]

face like structure found on Pluto

[Sharon]

Fascinating event

Space amazes yet scares me. We're nothing compared to the size of it

[DiamondSmiles]

Originally Posted by Sharon76 ↗

Fascinating event

Space amazes yet scares me. We're nothing compared to the size of it

I feel so insignificant in an airplane!

[kellyhound]

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has discovered a vast, craterless plain in Pluto's 'heart' that appears to be no more than 100 million years old, and is possibly still being shaped by geologic processes.

This frozen region is north of Pluto's icy mountains, in the centre-left of the heart feature informally named Tombaugh Region.

"This terrain is not easy to explain," said Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team (GGI) at NASA's Ames Research Centre in California.

"The discovery of vast, craterless, very young plains on Pluto exceeds all pre-flyby expectations," said Moore.

This fascinating icy plains region - resembling frozen mud cracks on Earth - has been informally named "Sputnik Planum" (Sputnik Plain) after the Earth's first artificial satellite.

It has a broken surface of irregularly-shaped segments, roughly 20 kilometres across, bordered by what appear to be shallow troughs, NASA said.

Some of these troughs have darker material within them, while others are traced by clumps of hills that appear to rise above the surrounding terrain.

Elsewhere, the surface appears to be etched by fields of small pits that may have formed by a process called sublimation, in which ice turns directly from solid to gas, just as dry ice does on Earth.

The irregular shapes may be the result of the contraction of surface materials, similar to what happens when mud dries.

Alternatively, they may be a product of convection, similar to wax rising in a lava lamp, researchers said.

On Pluto, convection would occur within a surface layer of frozen carbon monoxide, methane and nitrogen, driven by the scant warmth of Pluto's interior.

Pluto's icy plains also display dark streaks that are a few miles long. These streaks appear to be aligned in the same direction and may have been produced by winds blowing across the frozen surface.

The "heart of the heart" image was taken when New Horizons was 77,000 kilometres from Pluto, and shows features as small as 1 kilometre across.

Mission scientists will learn more about these mysterious terrains from higher-resolution and stereo images that New Horizons will pull from its digital recorders and send back to Earth during the next year.

[gatagato]

Here is it, Sputnik Plain

Frozen Plains in the Heart of Pluto’s ‘Heart’



Frozen Plains in the Heart of Pluto’s ‘Heart’ (annotated)

This annotated view of a portion of Pluto’s Sputnik Planum (Sputnik Plain), named for Earth’s first artificial satellite, shows an array of enigmatic features.

[Illusion]

The latest images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft have scientists stunned – not only for their breathtaking views of Pluto’s majestic icy mountains, streams of frozen nitrogen and haunting low-lying hazes, but also for their strangely familiar, arctic look.

[commondenom]

can't a mod merge the two pluto threads??

http://www.documentingreality.com/fo...-pluto-154180/

[kellyhound]

click link for even bigger http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/fi...ed_release.png

[Illusion]

In this highest-resolution image from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, great blocks of Pluto’s water-ice crust appear jammed together in the informally named al-Idrisi mountains. Some mountain sides appear coated in dark material, while other sides are bright. Several sheer faces appear to show crustal layering, perhaps related to the layers seen in some of Pluto’s crater walls. Other materials appear crushed between the mountains, as if these great blocks of water ice, some standing as much as 1.5 miles high, were jostled back and forth. The mountains end abruptly at the shoreline of the informally named Sputnik Planum, where the soft, nitrogen-rich ices of the plain form a nearly level surface, broken only by the fine trace work of striking, cellular boundaries and the textured surface of the plain’s ices (which is possibly related to sunlight-driven ice sublimation). This view is about 50 miles wide. The top of the image is to Pluto’s northwest.

[Illusion]

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has returned the best color and the highest resolution images yet of Pluto’s largest moon, Charon – and these pictures show a surprisingly complex and violent history.

At half the diameter of Pluto, Charon is the largest satellite relative to its planet in the solar system. Many New Horizons scientists expected Charon to be a monotonous, crater-battered world; instead, they’re finding a landscape covered with mountains, canyons, landslides, surface-color variations and more.

“We thought the probability of seeing such interesting features on this satellite of a world at the far edge of our solar system was low,” said Ross Beyer, an affiliate of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team from the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, “but I couldn't be more delighted with what we see."

High-resolution images of the Pluto-facing hemisphere of Charon, taken by New Horizons as the spacecraft sped through the Pluto system on July 14 and transmitted to Earth on Sept. 21, reveal details of a belt of fractures and canyons just north of the moon’s equator. This great canyon system stretches more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) across the entire face of Charon and likely around onto Charon’s far side. Four times as long as the Grand Canyon, and twice as deep in places, these faults and canyons indicate a titanic geological upheaval in Charon’s past.

“It looks like the entire crust of Charon has been split open,” said John Spencer, deputy lead for GGI at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “With respect to its size relative to Charon, this feature is much like the vast Valles Marineris canyon system on Mars.”