MEXICO: Following the path taken by the crew of the starship Enterprise in “Star Trek,” mankind is boldly going where no one has gone before as NASA’s unmanned interplanetary space probe, dubbed New Horizons, has shown remarkable details of the dwarf planet Pluto.
Although the New Horizons mission completed its historic flyby of Pluto on July 14, new information and images continue to be revealed as data is received.
The mission has collected such a massive amount of data it will take 16 months for all of it to be received on Earth.
The John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and the Southwest Research Institute have engineered the probe.
It is equipped with seven instruments, three of them optical, two of them plasma, a dust sensor and a radiometer. With just these instruments, new, groundbreaking discoveries are being made.
Until New Horizons, the best images of Pluto showed a small spherical gathering of grey pixels. The surface of Pluto was once thought to be heavily cratered, but with the New Horizons mission, one of the first of many surprises was to find that Pluto has a significant amount of smooth and icy plains on its surface.
“This terrain is not easy to explain,” said Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imagining Team at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffet Field, California. “The discovery of vast, craterless, very young plains on Pluto exceeds all pre-flyby expectations.”
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