By Barry Eitel
SAN FRANCISCO
NASA revealed stunning new images of Pluto on Wednesday after its New Horizons spacecraft ended radio silence late last night following an historic close encounter with the far-away dwarf planet.
At a press conference held at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, the leaders of the New Horizons team excitedly revealed new data collected during the past 24 hours, when the spacecraft zipped nearby Pluto’s surface and its seven instruments scrambled to capture all the information possible.
Researchers are excited about new images displaying Pluto’s oddly shaped moon, Hydra, which is mostly composed of water ice, the team now believes. They also learned new facts about Pluto’s largest moon, Charon. Images show its surface is marked by huge canyons and cliffs, as well as evidence that it is geologically active.
Pluto is also home to some impressive mountain ranges, NASA claims, with some peaks reaching 3,400 meters (11,000 feet) high. The surface of the dwarf planet – a status Pluto has held since a few months after New Horizons launched in 2006 – is covered with nitrogen, methane and water ice.
NASA believes the mountains on Pluto are less than 100 million years old, meaning that the icy world is geologically active, which goes against previous theories that space objects billion of miles away from the heat of the sun are inert.
“We’ve settled the fact that these very small planets can be active for a long time and I think that’s going to send a lot of geophysicists back to the drawing board,” an exuberant Alan Stern, New Horizons’ principal investigator, said at the conference Wednesday.
New Horizons’ visit to Pluto was fleeting – the craft is now millions of miles past the cold sphere and is headed into the Kuiper Belt, a region of space debris that forms the outer edge of the solar system.
