Miami: Icy mountain ranges can be seen rising from Pluto’s surface, according to the first close-up images released yesterday from NASA’s New Horizon’s spacecraft after its historic of flyby of the dwarf planet.
The mountains’ elevation reaches 11,000 feet, the US space agency said, or about as high as the Rocky Mountains.
Scientists were also stunned to see a close-up section of Pluto that showed no sign of craters, despite its home in the Kuiper Belt, the region beyond Neptune where cosmic debris is constantly pelting Pluto and its five moons.
NASA said the findings suggest that Pluto is geologically active, and contains parts that are youthful in astronomical terms, perhaps less than 100 million years old, a small fraction of the 4.5 billion year age of the solar system. “It might be active right now,” said project scientist John Spencer.
Scientists first saw hints of a geologically active phenomenon on Triton, a moon of Neptune that was glimpsed by the Voyager 2 space mission in the 1980s. It also had virtually no impact craters. “Now we have settled the fact that these very small planets can be very active after a long time and I think it is going to send a lot of geophysicists back to the drawing boards to try and understand how exactly you do that,” said principal investigator Alan Stern. “The bedrock that makes those mountains must be made of H20, of water-ice,” said Stern.
Other kinds of ice that are abundant on the surface of Pluto are made of nitrogen, methane and carbon monoxide.
“You can’t make mountains out of that stuff. It is just too soft,” Spencer told reporters.
New Horizons, a $700m nuclear-powered spacecraft, spent much of Tuesday snapping pictures and collecting data as it zoomed by Pluto. The piano-sized spacecraft passed 7,750 miles — or about the distance from New York to Mumbai, India — from Pluto’s surface. Those images, including color data on Pluto and some of its five moons, offer 10 times more detail than ever before seen. But the information the spacecraft has gathered is only beginning to reach Earth, after a journey of nearly 10 years and three billion miles. AFP
