After a 9 year journey, NASA’s New Horizon Satellite finally reached its destination earlier last week. Its mission: to take high resolution pictures of the dwarf planet farthest away from our sun, Pluto.
Signals take 4.5 hours to reach the Earth from the New Horizon Satellite. Even though all the data it has collected so far won’t reach earth for another 16 months, what we have learned so far is fascinating, ableit confusing.
The newest images show that Pluto is much more interesting than we previously thought. Being so far from the sun, any energy source we thought that Pluto had would be nothing more than a hunk of rock and ice. It turns out that Pluto is as geologically active as any other planet in our solar system. Previous research assumed that Pluto was too small to still have an internal source of energy left over from its creation, but this assumption may be proven false with these pictures.
Pluto’s surface is covered with icy mountains and frozen tundra. These ice mountains reach heights up to 11,000 feet, similar to the Rocky Mountain Range in the United States. Much of Pluto’s surface is clean and lacks any craters, indicating that the surface of the dwarf planet is fairly young. Something is generating fresh terrain on Pluto, but we don’t know what it is yet. There are canyons on the icy surface that may indicate volcanic activity or wind erosion.
The ice that covers Pluto is methane and its atmosphere is made of nitrogen. This methane ice is also covers the surface of the planet, not just its poles. The pole and the equator of Pluto both contain ice but the type of ice is very different at the two locations. Think of the difference between fresh fallen powder on a pristine mountain and hard packed snow on a road 3 days after it has snowed. They are both the same substance, but they look and behave very differently.
The New Horizon also took some high resolution pictures of Charon, Pluto’s largest moon. It is thought that Pluto and its moon were formed at the same time as the rest of our solar system, and from the same material, but was flung out into deep space billions of years ago.
What we learn from Pluto will give us a greater knowledge of the edge of our solar system and the many bodies of rock and ice that lie out there beyond Neptune. The New Horizon Satellite will continue to fly deeper into space on its way to examine a belt of unknown objects that encircle our solar system.