They say travel opens the mind. Well, NASA shot a spacecraft three billion miles at the most distant large objects in our solar system and got its collective mind blown.
“Stunned and stumped” and “This may cause us to rethink what powers geological activity on many other icy worlds” are the kinds of things agency scientists are saying about photos and data retrieved from the spacecraft New Horizons and its encounters this week with Pluto and its moon Charon.
It’s exactly what they were shooting for: Humankind’s first views of strange new worlds are expanding our understanding … even if, so far, it’s just our understanding how much we have to learn.
We leave the familiar to find the strange to expand our minds. And how.
The latest image of Charon is a case in point (click on it for a larger view).
NASA says,
The image shows an area approximately 240 miles (390 kilometers) from top to bottom, including few visible craters.
“The most intriguing feature is a large mountain sitting in a moat,” said Jeff Moore with NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California, who leads New Horizons’ Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team. “This is a feature that has geologists stunned and stumped.”
Here is New Horizons’ first close-up view of Pluto’s surface (you’ll find more details in the gallery above) …
The main takeaway from the image is that Pluto is active geologically, even though it’s out there all alone without some other big body’s gravity to tug and pull on it.
That’s a surprise, NASA scientists said at a news conference on Wednesday. The image challenges assumptions about how small space objects like these can smooth themselves over. That is, scientists know Pluto has been pummeled by meteors, but it’s not showing the evidence of those strikes. Consequently, the dwarf planet is smoothing out its surface all on its own.
The agency stated,
Unlike the icy moons of giant planets, Pluto cannot be heated by gravitational interactions with a much larger planetary body. Some other process must be generating the mountainous landscape.
“This may cause us to rethink what powers geological activity on many other icy worlds,” says GGI deputy team leader John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.
The Associated Press adds:
… scientists now know Pluto is a bit bigger than thought, with a diameter of 1,473 miles, but still just two-thirds the size of Earth’s moon. And it is most certainly not frozen in time.
The zoom-in of Pluto, showing an approximately 150-mile swath of the dwarf planet, reveals a mountain range about 11,000 feet high and tens of miles wide. Scientists said the peaks — seemingly pushed up from Pluto’s subterranean bed of ice — appeared to be a mere 100 million years old. Pluto itself is 4.5 billion years old.
“Who would have supposed that there were ice mountains?” project scientist Hal Weaver said. “It’s just blowing my mind.”
NASA has a press conference scheduled for 10 am Pacific Time today in which scientists will discuss, undoubtedly, more mind blowing photos and data sent back by the New Horizons spacecraft.
Stay tuned!
Jake Ellison can be reached at 206-448-8334 or jakeellison@seattlepi.com. Follow Jake on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Jake_News. Also, swing by and *LIKE* his page on Facebook.
If Google Plus is your thing, check out our science coverage here.
from The Big Science Blog http://ift.tt/1Kbatz1
They say travel opens the mind. Well, NASA shot a spacecraft three billion miles at the most distant large objects in our solar system and got its collective mind blown.
“Stunned and stumped” and “This may cause us to rethink what powers geological activity on many other icy worlds” are the kinds of things agency scientists are saying about photos and data retrieved from the spacecraft New Horizons and its encounters this week with Pluto and its moon Charon.
It’s exactly what they were shooting for: Humankind’s first views of strange new worlds are expanding our understanding … even if, so far, it’s just our understanding how much we have to learn.
We leave the familiar to find the strange to expand our minds. And how.
The latest image of Charon is a case in point (click on it for a larger view).
NASA says,
The image shows an area approximately 240 miles (390 kilometers) from top to bottom, including few visible craters.
“The most intriguing feature is a large mountain sitting in a moat,” said Jeff Moore with NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California, who leads New Horizons’ Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team. “This is a feature that has geologists stunned and stumped.”
Here is New Horizons’ first close-up view of Pluto’s surface (you’ll find more details in the gallery above) …
The main takeaway from the image is that Pluto is active geologically, even though it’s out there all alone without some other big body’s gravity to tug and pull on it.
That’s a surprise, NASA scientists said at a news conference on Wednesday. The image challenges assumptions about how small space objects like these can smooth themselves over. That is, scientists know Pluto has been pummeled by meteors, but it’s not showing the evidence of those strikes. Consequently, the dwarf planet is smoothing out its surface all on its own.
The agency stated,
Unlike the icy moons of giant planets, Pluto cannot be heated by gravitational interactions with a much larger planetary body. Some other process must be generating the mountainous landscape.
“This may cause us to rethink what powers geological activity on many other icy worlds,” says GGI deputy team leader John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.
The Associated Press adds:
… scientists now know Pluto is a bit bigger than thought, with a diameter of 1,473 miles, but still just two-thirds the size of Earth’s moon. And it is most certainly not frozen in time.
The zoom-in of Pluto, showing an approximately 150-mile swath of the dwarf planet, reveals a mountain range about 11,000 feet high and tens of miles wide. Scientists said the peaks — seemingly pushed up from Pluto’s subterranean bed of ice — appeared to be a mere 100 million years old. Pluto itself is 4.5 billion years old.
“Who would have supposed that there were ice mountains?” project scientist Hal Weaver said. “It’s just blowing my mind.”
NASA has a press conference scheduled for 10 am Pacific Time today in which scientists will discuss, undoubtedly, more mind blowing photos and data sent back by the New Horizons spacecraft.
Stay tuned!
Jake Ellison can be reached at 206-448-8334 or jakeellison@seattlepi.com. Follow Jake on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Jake_News. Also, swing by and *LIKE* his page on Facebook.
If Google Plus is your thing, check out our science coverage here.
from The Big Science Blog http://ift.tt/1Kbatz1
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