CANADA: Scientists revealed Saturday the new, high resolution photos of Pluto taken from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. The new images show what Yahoo! News describes as “unparalleled geographical variety”-a mix of mountains, dunes, valleys, craters and ice flows.
In a statement, New Horizons’ principal investigator and Southwest Research Institute scientist Alan Stern said, “Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of process that rival anything we’ve seen in the solar system.”
“If an artist had painted this Pluto before our flyby, I probably would have called it over the top-but that’s what is actually there,” he added.
According to Yahoo!, NASA scientists said that the “stunning pictures, displaying chaotically jumbled mountains and other dramatic geographical features, is somewhat reminiscent of the helter-skelter terrain of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa.”
Published in USA Today, it said that in an interview with NASA, scientist William B. McKinnon said that “seeing dunes on Pluto… would be completely wild, because Pluto’s atmosphere today is so thin.”
“Either Pluto had a thicker atmosphere in the past, or some process we haven’t figured out is at work. It’s a head scratcher,” McKinnon added.
In the same article, USA Today highlighted the distinct differences seen in the terrain between moons Chara, Nix and Hydra. (Chara, Nix and Hydra are moons of the planet Pluto.) And comparing the three moons, NASA said that Chara, over the years, is the most damaged among the three. Next week, the probe will send more images of the three moons.
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