CANADA: Within just the first three weeks of the 16 month data download from New Horizons, mission scientists had already unlocked many of Pluto’s fuzzy mysteries with startlingly clear images and radiography and spectrometry results revealing a young, still-forming surface and an atmosphere much more and at the same time much less than expected.
Pluto is no more subjected to an icy image; it is a lot more than that. This far away world is more Earth-like than we expected it to be. Frosted glaciers slowly drain moisture from icy mountains that tower over smooth, lowland basins. The sky above has layers of haze.
Over two months after its historic flyby of Pluto, New Horizons is sending back a stream of data, helping its science teams answer outstanding questions about the dwarf planetary system and explore new mysteries surrounding Pluto’s formation and its relationship with the Kuiper Belt and the solar system.
New Horizons team member Simon Porter of the Southwest Research Institute stated that the image reminds him of the Transantarctic Mountains along the Ross Ice Sheet, because of the tall mountains looming over a flat open expanse of ever-changing ice.
According to Alan Stern, New Horizons Principal Investigator, “And what’s coming is the best datasets, the highest-resolution images and spectra, the most important atmospheric datasets, and more. It’s a treasure trove.”
In July, the New Horizons spacecraft flew within 8,000 miles of the dwarf planet’s surface. It collected as much data as it could and snapped several pictures of the icy world. New Horizons also stood as a witness to a beautiful sunset on Pluto. NASA released the collection the spacecraft did in July leaving many in total admiration of Pluto.
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