‘Beautiful eye candy’: Frozen plains in Pluto’s heart
Jul 17, 2015, 1:38 PM
This July 14, 2015 photo provided by NASA shows an image taken from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft showing a new close-up image from the heart-shaped feature on the surface of Pluto that reveals a vast, craterless plain. (NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI via AP)
(NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI via AP)
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Vast frozen plains exist next door to Pluto’s big, rugged mountains sculpted of ice, scientists said Friday, three days after humanity’s first-ever flyby of the dwarf planet.
The New Horizons spacecraft team revealed close-up photos of those plains, which they’re already unofficially calling Sputnik Planum after the world’s first man-made satellite.
“Have a look at the icy frozen plains of Pluto,” principal scientist Alan Stern said during a briefing at NASA headquarters. “Who would have expected this kind of complexity?”
Stern described the pictures coming down from 3 billion miles away as “beautiful eye candy.”
“I’m still having to remind myself to take deep breaths,” added Jeff Moore, head of the New Horizons geology team at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. “I mean, the landscape is just astoundingly amazing.”
Spanning hundreds of miles, the plains are located in the prominent, bright, heart-shaped area of Pluto. Like the mountains unveiled Wednesday, the plains look to be a relatively young 100 million years old — at the most. Scientists speculate internal heating — perhaps from icy volcanoes or geysers– might still be shaping these crater-free regions.
“This could be only a week old for all we know,” Moore said. He stressed that scientists have no hard evidence of erupting, geyser-like plumes on Pluto — yet.
Another possibility could be that the terrain, like frozen mud cracks on Earth, formed as a result of contraction of the surface.
The plains — which include clusters of smooth hills and fields of small pits — are covered with irregular-shaped, or polygon, sections that look to be separated by troughs. Each section is roughly 12 miles across.
The height of the hills is not yet known, nor their origin. It could be the hills were pushed up from below, or are knobs surrounded by eroded terrain, according to Moore. The fields of pits resemble glacial fields on Earth.
As of Friday’s news conference, New Horizons was just over 2 million miles past Pluto and operating well. The spacecraft on Tuesday became the first visitor to the 4.5 billion-year-old Pluto, sweeping within 7,700 miles of its icy surface after a journey of 9
Copyright © The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
