Category Astronomy/Space

A new close-up image of Pluto reveals a vast, craterless plain that appears to be no more than 100M yrs old, and is possibly still being shaped by geologic processes. This frozen region is north of Pluto’s icy mountains, in the center-left of the heart feature, informally named “Tombaugh Regio” (Tombaugh Region) after Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930.

This fascinating icy plains region – resembling frozen mud cracks on Earth — has been informally named “Sputnik Planum” (Sputnik Plain) after the Earth’s first artificial satellite. It has a broken surface of irregularly-shaped segments, roughly 12 miles across, bordered by what appear to be shallow troughs...

IMAGE1: The latest spectra from New Horizons Ralph instrument reveal abundance of methane ice, but with striking differences from place to place across the frozen surface of Pluto. “We just learned that in the north polar cap, methane ice is diluted in a thick, transparent slab of nitrogen ice resulting in strong absorption of infrared light,” …In one of the visually dark equatorial patches, the methane ice has shallower infrared absorptions indicative of a different texture. “The spectrum appears as if the ice is less diluted in N…or that it has a different texture in that area.”

IMAGE2: New close-up images of a region near Pluto’s equator reveal a giant surprise – a range of youthful mountains rising as high as 11,000 feet above the surface of the icy body...

A team from US, France, U.K. is reporting data sent back by Mars rover Curiosity suggests Mars may have once had a continental crust similar to Earth. They describe 20 rocks that had been probed by the rover, and why their findings suggest a different history for the planet than has been thought. Researchers believe they have found evidence that suggests that rather than a lack of magmatic planetary activity, which should have been evident in rock samples showing mostly basalt, rock samples are full of silica and have a rich composition.

The light-colored rock samples are from an area inside the Gale Crater (in the southern hemisphere near Mount Sharp) and have been dated back to approximately 3.6B years ago...

After a decade-long journey through our solar system, New Horizons made its closest approach to Pluto Tues, 7,750 miles above the surface – roughly the same distance from NY to Mumbai, India – making it the 1st-ever space mission to explore a world so far from Earth.

“New Horizons is the latest in a long line of scientific accomplishments at NASA, including multiple missions orbiting and exploring the surface of Mars in advance of human visits still to come; the remarkable Kepler mission to identify Earth-like planets around stars other than our own; and the DSCOVR satellite that soon will be beaming back images of the whole Earth in near real-time from a vantage point a million miles away...