SCIENCE BOND

Posts

Showing posts with the label pluto

The New Horizons sent the super-sharp pictures of Pluto

The images released by the US space agency on Friday show details on the surface of the dwarf planet at a resolution better than 80m per pixel. On Earth at this scale, one could easily discern a city park. With New Horizons, we see crystal clear views of mountains, craters and smooth ice fields. "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, the head of Nasa's science directorate. "New Horizons thrilled us during the July flyby with the first close images of Pluto, and as the spacecraft transmits the treasure trove of images in its onboard memory back to us, we continue to be amazed by what we see." The probe got to about 12,500km from the surface of the dwarf and acquired a mass of pictures and other instrument data. But because of the vast separation to Earth, and the modest transm...

Two ice volcanoes found on the surface of Pluto

Wright Mons on Pluto They are seen in images returned from the New Horizons probe, which flew past the distant dwarf planet in July. The mountains are several km high and tens of km across, and each has what appears to be a depression in the top. Unlike Earth volcanoes that spew molten rock, Pluto's volcanoes - if that is what they are - would likely erupt an icy slush of substances such as water, nitrogen, ammonia or methane. The suggestion was raised at the 47th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences, where the mission team is presenting over 50 research reports from the flyby. The scientists still need to do further work to confirm their volcano idea. What would help in particular is information on the composition of the materials making up the local terrain. "If we can constrain the compositions of these features then we'd have something to work with, with respect to modelling how t...

An image of Kerberos Pluto's moon finally shows itself

It shows the object to have two lobes, which may be the consequence of icy bodies bumping into each other and joining up. Kerberos's larger lobe is judged to be about 8km across. The smaller lobe is roughly 5km in diameter. Styx, the other little moon in the system, is of a comparable size. Mission scientists say these satellites are brighter than they expected. Planetary bodies usually darken over time as a result of chemical changes triggered by sunlight and cosmic ray impacts. But these moons reflect about 50% of all incident light, which indicates their water-ice covering is very clean. Kerberos orbits about 60,000km from Pluto and is the second- outermost of five moons. It sits between Nix and Hydra, and beyond the orbits of Styx and the much larger Charon, the dominant moon in the system. The newly released image of Kerberos was acquired by New Horizons' Lorri camera from a distance of just under 400,000km. The picture incorporates a number...

The latest image of Pluto release from the New Horizons mission

The Nasa probe, which flew by the dwarf planet in July, continues to downlink its data, and as it comes in, the scientists get to work on it. The ripples stretch for many hundreds of km. It looks more like tree bark or dragon scales than geology," observed mission team member Bill McKinnon. This'll really take time to figure out; maybe it's some combination of internal tectonic forces and ice sublimation driven by Pluto's faint sunlight," the Washington University, St Louis, scientist said in a US space agency release. The best way to look at "scales" is to browse the new high-resolution enhanced colour view of Pluto that has been made available (PNG file, 70MB). The features are on the far eastern edge.This super image comes from the Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera on New Horizons. It combines blue, red and near infrared (NIR) images. The enhanced view will help decode the various geological and climatological processes that hav...

Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft a new target to aim " Pluto"

Nasa's New Horizons rocket has another focus to go for taking after its notable flyby of Pluto. It is called 2014 MU69, and was one of two comet-like protests that were under thought by researchers chipping away at the mission. The US space office will now complete an audit of the arrangement before formally favoring the mission's expansion. New Horizons completed its flyby of Pluto in July, drawing nearer to 12,500km from the diminutive person planet's surface. The shuttle caught nitty gritty pictures and other information of Pluto, as well as of its moons: Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra. The new target speaks the truth a billion and a half km past Pluto. It speaks the truth 45km crosswise over and is thought to be one of the building squares from which greater universes, for example, Pluto are framed. Such questions shape a locale of the external Solar System called the Kuiper Belt, containing a profound stop test of what our ine...