Pluto Shares its First Secrets!
Just one day after its successful Pluto Flyby, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft sent back the first close-up photos of the dwarf planet and its largest moon, Charon.
Not only does Pluto have a mountain range with peaks 3500 meters high which formed no more than 100 million years ago – quite young for a celestial object in a 4.56-billion-year-old solar system -, but Charon looks completely different with cliffs and canyons (one being 7 to 9 km deep!).
The spacecraft also sent new information about Pluto’s outermost known moons, Hydra. We now know that it is about 43 by 33 kilometers with an almost entirely icy surface.
These discoveries are quite impressive, but are also just the beginning. It will take up to 16 months to receive and collect all the data that New Horizons is sending. The spacecraft is now continuing its mission into the Kuiper Belt – a region of space beyond the planets consisting mainly of icy objects.
For the complete image gallery: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/images/index.html
Credit: NASA’s website
Tags:
#space #the power of science #Pluto #oh look an update
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