[meteorite-list] From Mountains to Moons: Multiple Discoveries from NASA's New Horizons Pluto Mission

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu, 16 Jul 2015 16:35:02 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <201507162335.t6GNZ26J014600_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

July 15, 2015

RELEASE 15-152

>From Mountains to Moons: Multiple Discoveries from NASA's New Horizons Pluto Mission

Icy mountains on Pluto and a new, crisp view of its largest moon, Charon,
are among the several discoveries announced Wednesday by the NASA's New
Horizons team, just one day after the spacecraft's first ever Pluto flyby.

"Pluto New Horizons is a true mission of exploration showing us why basic
scientific research is so important," said John Grunsfeld, associate
administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "The
mission has had nine years to build expectations about what we would see
during closest approach to Pluto and Charon. Today, we get the first sampling
of the scientific treasure collected during those critical moments, and I can
tell you it dramatically surpasses those high expectations."

"Home run!" said Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons at
the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. "New Horizons
is returning amazing results already. The data look absolutely gorgeous, and
Pluto and Charon are just mind blowing."

A new close-up image of an equatorial region near the base of Pluto's
bright heart-shaped feature shows a mountain range with peaks jutting as
high as 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) above the surface of the icy body.

The mountains on Pluto likely formed no more than 100 million years ago --
mere youngsters in a 4.56-billion-year-old solar system. This suggests the
close-up region, which covers about one percent of Pluto's surface, may
still be geologically active today.

"This is one of the youngest surfaces we've ever seen in the solar
system," said Jeff Moore of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and
Imaging Team (GGI) at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field,
California.

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 at SwRI.

The new view of Charon reveals a youthful and varied terrain. Scientists are
surprised by the apparent lack of craters. A swath of cliffs and troughs
stretching about 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) suggests widespread fracturing
of Charon's crust, likely the result of internal geological processes. The
image also shows a canyon estimated to be 4 to 6 miles (7 to 9 kilometers)
deep. In Charon's north polar region, the dark surface markings have a
diffuse boundary, suggesting a thin deposit or stain on the surface.

New Horizons also observed the smaller members of the Pluto system, which
includes four other moons: Nix, Hydra, Styx and Kerberos. A new sneak-peak
image of Hydra is the first to reveal its apparent irregular shape and
its size, estimated to be about 27 by 20 miles (43 by 33 kilometers).

The observations also indicate Hydra's surface is probably coated with water
ice. Future images will reveal more clues about the formation of this and the
other moon billions of years ago. Spectroscopic data from New Horizons'
Ralph instruments reveal an abundance of methane ice, but with striking
differences among regions across the frozen surface of Pluto.

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland
designed, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the
mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. SwRI leads the mission,
science team, payload operations and encounter science planning. New Horizons
is part of NASA's New Frontiers Program, managed by the agency's Marshall
Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Follow the New Horizons mission on Twitter and use the hashtag
#PlutoFlyby to join the conversation. Live updates also will be available on
the mission Facebook page .

For more information on the New Horizons mission, including fact sheets,
schedules, video and all the new images, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons

and

http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/plutotoolkit.cfm


-end-
Received on Thu 16 Jul 2015 07:35:02 PM PDT