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July 14, 2015

Hello, Pluto! New Horizons flies by after nearly 10 years

by Brett Smith

Also by Chuck Bednar and Emily Bills

UPDATE 3:50PM CST: New Horizons sends back new images of Pluto, Charon

On Tuesday afternoon, following its successful flyby of Pluto, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has sent back new images of the dwarf planet and its moon Charon that depict both of the objects in exaggerated colors that the US space agency says highlight their compositional diversity.

The new pictures were obtained using three of the color filters of the probe's "Ralph" instrument and were captured on July 13 at 3:38am EDT. The pictures will help scientists better understand the molecular composition of the ice found on the surface of Pluto and Charon, as well as the age of craters and other geologic features and surface changes caused by space weather.

Furthermore, the images show that the so-called "heart" of Pluto consists of two regions made up of remarkably different colors: a western lobe that is similar in shape to an ice-cream cone and is peach-colored in the image, and a bluish area on the right side of the picture. There is also a mid-latitude band that appears in shades ranging from pale blue through red, NASA said.

"These images show that Pluto and Charon are truly complex worlds. There's a whole lot going on here," explained New Horizons co-investigator Will Grundy from the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. "Our surface composition team is working as fast as we can to identify the substances in different regions on Pluto and unravel the processes that put them where they are."

Original story

At 7:49AM EST this morning, NASA's New Horizons probe made its closest pass to Pluto--7,750 miles from the surface of the dwarf planet. (YAY!)

In doing so, it became the first space mission ever to explore a world so far from Earth, officials at the US space agency said. They journey lasted nearly 10 years and spanned about three billion miles, and once the probe re-establishes contact with ground control personnel on Tuesday night, it will begin transmitting data back to Earth - a process that will take 16 months to complete.

"The exploration of Pluto and its moons by New Horizons represents the capstone event to 50 years of planetary exploration by NASA and the United States," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement. "Once again we have achieved a historic first. The United States is the first nation to reach Pluto, and with this mission has completed the initial survey of our solar system, a remarkable accomplishment that no other nation can match."

"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," added John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Pluto is not a disappointment

Scientists are expecting data gathered in the flyby to provide a treasure trove of information, as just the approach over the last couple weeks has offered tantalizing clues about the former planet.

The latest images from New Horizons have shown Pluto to be nearly 1,500 miles in diameter, which makes it the largest body in the solar system-circling Kuiper Belt. Probe data also confirmed the existence of a polar ice cap on Pluto, as well as the sizes of three of Pluto's moons.

"Pluto is not disappointing," said New Horizon's principal investigator Alan Stern during a NASA briefing on Monday.

New Horizons measurements confirm it is indeed bigger than Eris, another large planetary body in the Kuiper belt. Data show Pluto is about 28 miles wider than Eris.

"This settles the debate about the largest object in the Kuiper Belt," Stern said.

With Pluto's mass already determined, establishing the dwarf planet's size has allowed scientists to determine it is less dense than previously thought, indicating Pluto may have a very icy interior. Stern stressed this possibility is still under investigation. We do know, however, that it snows on Pluto, according to NASA.

Taking names and taking measurements

New Horizons took measurements of three of Pluto's five known moons. Data confirmed Charon, the largest moon, is 751 miles across. New Horizons also found Nix is about 20 miles wide and Hydra was revealed to be about 30 miles across. Measurements of the other two moons, Kerberos and Styx, were scheduled for Tuesday.

The probe's ALICE instrument, an ultraviolet photo spectrometer, confirmed the presence of a polar ice cap made of methane and nitrogen ice. The pole differs in structure from the dark features around the dwarf planet's equator, and later analyses of a strange dark patch at Charon's north pole will be transmitted back this week, NASA said.

New Horizons discovered nitrogen escaping from Pluto's atmosphere five days ago, much earlier than was expected. The discovery indicates that Pluto may be losing its atmosphere faster than had been thought. One possible explanation for the remote source of nitrogen is that New Horizons made a fortuitous approach, the NASA team said.

Pluto is actually RED

It looks like Mars can't be called the"Red Planet" anymore! NASA expected Pluto to be icy and grey, but it's not. It's red because it's atmosphere contains quantities of methane, nitrogen, and carbon monoxide, and when UV light from the sun gets to Pluto, it interacts with the methane molecules to create a reddish gunk called tholin. The tholin then silts down to the surface to settle, creating the red hue.

CS Monitor

Stunning images of Pluto and Charon: Not just ice balls anymore

Images of Pluto and its largest moon Charon, released Wednesday, show complex worlds with spectacular surface features that rival anything found elsewhere in the solar system.

By Pete Spotts, Staff writer July 15, 2015   

Laurel, Md. - Pluto and Charon are dead; long Live Pluto and Charon.

Gone forever are notions that the main actors in this binary planet system are relatively unremarkable ice balls beyond Neptune, thanks to NASA's New Horizons mission.

Images released today show complex worlds with spectacular surface features that rival anything found elsewhere in the solar system but with their own unique twists:
Recommended: Infographic Space Race, The Sequel: Who is exploring the cosmos today?

"¢ On Pluto, mountain ranges that appear to be built from ultra-hard water ice tens of miles wide vault up to 11,000 feet above the surrounding terrain. For mission scientists, they evoke comparisons with the Rocky Mountains in the western United States. Indeed, the dwarf planet seems to be made largely of water ice, covered by a relatively thin veneer of nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide ices.
Infographic Space Race, The Sequel: Who is exploring the cosmos today?
Photos of the Day Photos of the day 07/15

"¢ On Charon, Pluto's largest moon, canyons up to 4 miles deep are etched across its face, comparable in depth to Valles Marineris on Mars - one of the red planet's most impressive features. Charon also hosts a set of troughs, and cliffs extend for more than 600 miles across the surface.

"¢ On both, evidence suggests that they have had internal heat sources that allowed these bodies to refresh their surfaces within the past 100 million years. For Charon, the evidence comes in the form of an unexpectedly smooth surface, apparently lacking craters. For Pluto, geophysical activity appears to be ongoing.

This represents a fundamental discovery, mission scientists say.

Often, icy bodies that show such geological activity - think Saturn's moon Enceladus, for example - typically are moons orbiting giant planets.

The heat source driving the activity comes from friction inside a moon generated through gravitational interactions with the host planet as well as with any neighboring moons.

"That can't happen on Pluto," says John Spencer, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute and a member of the New Horizons science team. "There is no giant body that can be deforming Pluto on an ongoing, regular basis" to heat its interior.

Charon is too small to do that, he adds.

"This is telling us that you do not need tidal heating to power ongoing recent geological activity on icy worlds," he says. "That's a really important discovery that we just made this morning."

"We've settled the fact that these very small planets can be very active after a long time," added Alan Stern, also with the Southwest Research Institute and the New Horizons mission's lead scientist. "This is going to send a lot of geophysicists back to the drawing board to try to understand how exactly you do that."

The science team offers two potential explanations for the heat needed to produce geological activity: the decay of radioactive elements in a rocky core or the slow freeze-up of a subsurface ocean. The act of freezing releases heat. It also causes water to expand, a force that could have contributed to some of the surface features examined so far.

The notion of a thin veneer of other ices atop water ice also could imply active cryovolcanism on Pluto (the volcanic eruption of volatiles such as water, ammonia, or methane, instead of molten rock), although no evidence for that activity has appeared at this early stage of data analysis.

At the pace Pluto is losing its largely nitrogen atmosphere, over the course of the age of the solar system the planet would have lost the equivalent of a layer of nitrogen ice between 300 meters and 3 kilometers thick.

"If we only see a veneer, what's going on?" Dr. Stern asks. The nitrogen ice on the surface that is the source of the atmosphere's nitrogen needs to be replaced somehow.

"There must be internal activity that is dredging nitrogen up through cryovolcanism or geysers or some other process that's active into the present on this planet," he says.

The combination of majestic mountains of water ice and a thin veneer of other ices "is very strong evidence that will send us looking as we get more and more data across the surface of the close-approach hemisphere to look for evidence of exactly these phenomena," Stern says.

If these processes are still shaping Pluto - the largest object in an extended realm of icy worlds known as the Kuiper Belt, which extends billions of miles beyond Neptune - other Kuiper Belt objects of comparable size could be active as well, the researchers suggest.

Pluto pictures: Nasa reveals first high-resolution images of planet's surface

Mission culminates in images of former ninth planet that show mountain ranges of ice and suggest surface has recently been "˜paved over' by geological activity

Hannah Devlin Science correspondent
Thursday 16 July 2015 08.26 BST
Guardian

For 85 years, it was little more than a featureless grey blob on classroom maps of the solar system. On Wednesday night, Pluto was revealed in high resolution for the first time, revealing dramatic mountain ranges made from solid water ice on a scale to rival the Alps or the Rockies.

The extraordinary images of the former ninth planet and its large moon, Charon, beamed 4 bn miles back to Earth from the New Horizons spacecraft, marks the climax of a mission that has been quietly underway for nearly a decade.

Alan Stern, the mission's principal investigator, described the images as a "home run" for the team. "New Horizons is returning amazing results already. The data look absolutely gorgeous, and Pluto and Charon are just mind blowing."

Adding that one of the biggest surprises was the discovery that "there are mountains in the Kuiper belt", the solar system's mysterious "third zone" where Pluto sits amid around 100,000 smaller icy objects. John Spencer, a mission scientist, said the mountains appear to be around 11,000ft high and several hundred miles across. "These are pretty significant mountains. They'd stand up respectably against mountain ranges on Earth like the Rockies."

The detailed image that fills in one edge of the dwarf planet also revealed not a single crater, hinting that the surface has been recently been "paved over" by geological activity, which could include dramatic geysers blasting plumes of ice into the atmosphere or cryo-volcanoes that erupt in explosions of ice rather than molten rock.

In a nod to Pluto's former status as the ninth planet, until it was downgraded to dwarf planet in 2006, the Nasa press conference began with a rundown of spectacular images of the sun and the eight official planets. "We've brought what was previously a blurred point of light into focus," said Dwayne Brown, Nasa spokesman, as scientists and journalists waited for the image to be unveiled.

Pluto and its moons: detailed new images released - in pictures: View gallery: http://www.theguardian.com/science/gallery/2015/jul/15/pluto-and-its-moons-detailed-new-images-from-new-horizons-released-in-pictures

Stern described the images as "frankly just skimming the surface" of what would be learnt about the planet during the coming year. They have already produced some surprises. Scientists believe the mountains are made from water ice with just a thin veneer of "exotic" ices, methane and nitrogen. "You can't make mountains out of methane and nitrogen," said Spencer.

"Water ice is strong enough to hold up big mountains and that's what we think we're seeing here. This is the first time we've seen this. The methane and nitrogen are just a coating." The mountains on Pluto are likely to have formed no more than 100m years ago - extremely recently given the 4.56 bn-year-old solar system. This suggests the close-up region, which covers about 1% of Pluto's surface, may still be geologically active. The images mark the first time ice mountains have been seen outside of the moons of giant planets, and raises the question of what kind of geological process could be generating the mountainous landscape. Unlike on the moons, tidal forces cannot be involved.

"There is no giant body that can be deforming Pluto on an ongoing regular basis to heat the interior," said Stern. "So this is telling us you don't need tidal heating to power [to produce ice mountains]. This is a really big discovery that we've just made."

The structures, together with the smoothness of Pluto's surface, suggest that recent geological activity is taking place to cause upheaval and smooth over depressions caused by asteroid impacts. Scientists believe this "paving" process could be the result of internal heat that softens rock and ice or from snowfalls that blanket the surface. For scale, the images are so detailed that if the craft were flying over London we would be able to pick out Hyde Park's Serpentine pond or the airport runways at Heathrow.

The distance to Pluto - 5bn km - means it takes New Horizons hours to send back a single picture and it will take 16 months to return all the data it has accumulated during the fly-by, which will include atmospheric data. The team also announced that the heart-shaped feature visible on Pluto will now be known as the Tombaugh Regio, in honour of Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered the dwarf planet in 1930.

The new view of Charon reveals a varied complex terrain. A swath of cliffs and troughs stretching about 600 miles (1,000 km) suggests widespread fracturing of Charon's crust, which could also be the result of geological activity. The image also shows a dramatic canyon estimated to be 4-to-6 miles (7-to-9 km) deep.

Cathy Olkin, a mission scientist, said: "Charon just blew our socks off when we had the new image today. The team has just been abuzz. There is so much interesting science in this one image alone." Pluto is thought to be composed of about two thirds rock encased in a lot of ice, with surface temperatures of about minus 230C. As the £460m mission travels onwards into the Kuiper belt scientists hope that it will open up a window on the ancient solar system and the origins of planets, potentially helping to explain the formation of the Earth itself.

Andrew Coates, the head of planetary science at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, said: "These Kuiper belt objects are the building blocks of the outer solar system. They're all very cold - it's like a cosmic deep freeze. It's the best way of preserving solar system history. That is what is so fascinating about this. It's a really thrilling time for solar system exploration."

Next month, mission scientists will choose which of two objects to visit next. Nasa estimates that the spacecraft will be able to keep recording and transmitting until the mid-2030s. Then its plutonium power source will run out and it will shut down, drifting outwards towards the edge of the solar system and deep space beyond.

Pluto New Horizons mission: what happens next?: Read more.. http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jul/15/pluto-new-horizons-mission-common-questions

New Horizons also observed the smaller members of the Pluto system, which includes four other moons: Nix, Hydra, Styx and Kerberos. A new sneak-peek image of Hydra is the first to reveal its apparent irregular shape and its size, estimated to be about 27-by-20 miles (43-by-33km). "New Horizons is a true mission of exploration showing us why basic scientific research is so important," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for Nasa's Science Mission Directorate.

"The mission has had nine years to build expectations about what we would see during closest approach to Pluto and Charon. Today, we get the first sampling of the scientific treasure collected during those critical moments, and I can tell you it dramatically surpasses those high expectations."

The observations also indicate Hydra's surface is probably coated with water ice. Future images will reveal more clues about the formation of this, and the other moon, billions of years ago. Spectroscopic data from New Horizons' Ralph instruments reveal an abundance of methane ice, but with striking differences among regions across the frozen surface of Pluto.

Click to watch:
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CS Monitor

NASA flyby spies Pluto moon's mountainous moat

In a newly released photo, NASA's New Horizons probe spots a strange sight on Pluto's big moon Charon - a mountain sitting in a moat.

By Mike Wall, Space.com July 16, 2015   

Pluto's big moon Charon keeps getting more and more interesting.

A newly released Charon photo, which was taken by NASA's New Horizons probe during its epic Pluto flyby Tuesday (July 14), reveals a mountain rising out of a big hole on the 750-mile-wide (1,200 kilometers) moon's surface.

The feature, which is visible at the bottom left-hand corner of the inset, is "a large mountain sitting in a moat," Jeff Moore, of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, said in a statement. [See more Pluto photos by New Horizons]
Recommended: Are you a space whiz? Take our quiz!

"This is a feature that has geologists stunned and stumped," added Moore, who leads New Horizons' geology, geophysics and imaging team.

The new image covers an area about 200 miles long (320 km) from top to bottom, NASA officials explained in the statement. New Horizons captured the photo on Tuesday morning from a distance of 49,000 miles (79,000 km).

About 80 minutes later, the spacecraft reached its closest Pluto approach, zooming to within just 7,800 miles (12,500 km) of the dwarf planet's frigid surface. So there will be even better images of Charon - and of Pluto and its other four moons - coming down shortly.

Indeed, NASA will hold a news conference tomorrow (July 17) at 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT) to unveil and discuss the latest photos and discoveries from New Horizons. You can watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA TV.

The $723 million New Horizons mission launched in January 2006 to lift the veil on the Pluto system. The spacecraft gathered reams of data using seven different science instruments during its highly anticipated flyby. It will take up to 16 months for New Horizons to beam all of these observations back to its handlers on Earth.

But the few up-close images analyzed and released so far have revealed Pluto and Charon to be complex and surprising worlds that have been geologically active in the recent past. New Horizons spied 11,000-foot-high (3,500 meters) ice mountains on Pluto, for example, as well as Charon canyons up to 6 miles (10 km) deep.

CS Monitor

Does Pluto have a tail? (+video)

NASA's New Horizons space probe has detected signs of a 'tail' on Pluto, created by the dwarf planet's escaping atmosphere.

By Paul Sutherland, Sen July 19, 2015   

Sen-NASA's New Horizons team revealed fresh findings about Pluto today including a close-up of a vast "cracked" and icy plain and the existence of a tail caused by the escaping atmosphere.

Opening a press conference, Jim Green, director of Planetary Science at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said: "What a historic week!" And the mission's principal investigator Alan Stern said: We've just had the most fun. Pluto's becoming a brand. It sells itself. You don't really have to work that hard!" He added: "I'm a little biased, but I think the Solar System saved the best for last!"

First image shown was a heavily pixellated picture of one of Pluto's tiny moons, Nix. Stern, from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado, said that despite the low resolution, it showed in twice as many pixels as the best Earth-based image of Puto, which was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope.

Another image showed how early measurements have revealed an excess of the gas carbon monoxide over the bright, heart-shaped region. Stern said that no other concentration of the gas anything like that had been detected elsewhere on Pluto.

The bright zone has already been informally labelled Tombaugh Regio, in honour of Clyde Tombaugh who discovered Pluto in 1930. Within it, and north of Pluto's icy mountains, lies a vast plain, devoid of craters, and about 20km (12 miles) wide. Its irregular, polygonal pattern resembles cracks, but the team does not yet know how they formed.

Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team (GGI) at NASA's Ames Research Center, California, told the briefing: The landscape is just astoundingly amazing. Some regions have no craters at all, so obviously younger. It shows that geological processes are happening up to the present time."

He said that the "cracked" region was smooth but had irregularly-shaped segments, troughs, dark material within troughs, pitted surfaces and hills rising above the terrain. The polygons were like you might see on a boiling pot of oatmeal, or in dried mud. Another intriguing feature was a line of smudges, that might be streaks caused by prevailing winds. He said that they might point to active plumes on Pluto, though he cautioned that none had been discovered yet in the early stages of analysis.

The area has been informally dubbed Sputnik Planum, after the Russian satellite that was mankind's first space explorer, it was announced. Another mountainous zone has been called Norgay Montes, in honour of Sherpa Tenzing Norgay who, with Edmund Hillary, became the first men to reach the summit of Mount Everest in 1952. He is the first Nepalese person to have a feature named for him anywhere in the Solar System.

The New Horizons Atmospheres team has observed Pluto's nitrogen-rich atmosphere far beyond its surface. Fran Bagenal, of the University of Colorado, Boulder, estimated that 500 tons of material an hour was escaping from Pluto, compared to just one ton an hour on Mars which has a stronger gravitational pull, and was then being stripped away by the pressure from sunlight. It showed that a substantial amount of Pluto's mountain ice was being removed.

Bagenal said: "What we think is happening is that the solar wind will eventually interact with this escaping atmosphere and may produce a shock upstream." She said that the gas was ionised as it escaped and was producing a "tail" of cold, dense tail stretching as far as 1,600 km (1,000 miles) from the dwarf planet.

A surprise guest at the conference at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Maryland, and a mission collaborator, according to Stern, was Dr Brian May, guitarist with Queen. He said: "It's a thrill to be with you guys. What an amazing achievement. You've inspired the world."

Click to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hsCav2XuQ4

CS Monitor

NASA releases spectacular photos of Pluto moons Nix and Hydra

New photos offer the first up-close look at two of Pluto's satellites.

By Mike Wall, Space.com July 22, 2015   

Two of Pluto's small satellites are getting their moment in the sun.

Newly released photos captured by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft during its historic Pluto flyby on July 14 reveal intriguing new details about Nix and Hydra, two of the dwarf planet's five satellites. For example, Nix is shaped like a jelly bean and bears a curious red patch, while Hydra resembles a big, gray mitten.

The reddish region on Nix also appears to have a bull's-eye pattern, suggesting that it's an impact crater, researchers said. [New Horizons' Pluto Flyby: Complete Coverage]
Recommended: Are you a space whiz? Take our quiz!

"Additional compositional data has already been taken of Nix but is not yet downlinked. It will tell us why this region is redder than its surroundings," New Horizons mission scientist Carly Howett, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement today (July 21).

"This observation is so tantalizing, I'm finding it hard to be patient for more Nix data to be downlinked," she added.

New Horizons snapped the Nix photo from a distance of about 102,000 miles (165,000 kilometers). The image reveals that the satellite is about 26 miles long by 22 miles wide (42 by 36 km), researchers said.

Hydra is a bit bigger, at 34 miles long by 25 miles wide (55 by 40 km), according to the newly released photo, which New Horizons took when the probe was about 143,000 miles (231,000 km) from the mitten-shaped moon.

The Hydra image shows two apparent craters, and suggests that the upper and lower portions of the moon may be made of different stuff, at least on the surface. (In the photo, the upper part of Hydra looks darker than lower regions.)

"Before last week, Hydra was just a faint point of light, so it's a surreal experience to see it become an actual place, as we see its shape, and spot recognizable features on its surface for the first time," mission science collaborator Ted Stryk, of Roane State Community College in Tennessee, said in the same statement.

Pluto's other known moons are Charon, Kerberos and Styx. At 750 miles (1,207 km) in diameter, Charon is more than half as wide as Pluto itself, leading many researchers to regard Pluto-Charon as a binary system. Kerberos and Styx are even smaller than Nix and Hydra.

By mid-October, New Horizons will likely beam home images it took of Kerberos and Styx during the July 14 close encounter, NASA officials said.

It has taken a long time for scientists to take the measure of the Pluto system, which lies about 39 times farther from the sun than Earth does on average. The dwarf planet itself was discovered in 1930, and Charon wasn't spotted until 1978. Nix, Hydra, Kerberos and Styx were all detected by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope between 2005 and 2012.

Researchers, and the rest of humanity, finally got their first up-close look at these far-flung bodies when New Horizons zoomed through the Pluto system on July 14, coming within 7,800 miles (12,500 km) of the dwarf planet's surface.

NASA spacecraft spots second mountain range in Pluto's 'heart'

NASA's New Horizons space probe has imaged a second mountain range inside the heart-shaped feature on Pluto's surface.

By Mike Wall, SPACE.com July 22, 2015   

Pluto has a big heart - big enough to accommodate at least two sets of mountains, a new photo from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft reveals.

New Horizons has spotted a second mountain range inside Tombaugh Regio, the 1,200-mile-wide (2,000 kilometers) heart-shaped feature that mission team members named after Pluto's discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh.

This newfound range rises up to 1 mile (1.6 km) above Pluto's frigid surface, making it comparable in height to the Appalachian Mountains of the eastern United States, NASA officials said. Tombaugh Regio's other known mountain range, by contrast, is more similar to the tall and jagged Rocky Mountains, topping out at more than 2 miles (3.2 km) in elevation.

The newly discovered range lies just west of the ice plains known as Sputnik Planum and is 68 miles (110 km) northwest of the taller mountain range, which mission scientists are calling Norgay Montes after Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, who along with Edmund Hillary completed the first-ever ascent of Mt. Everest, in 1953. (Tombaugh Regio, Norgay Montes and other such names remain informal monikers until they're officially approved by the International Astronomical Union.)

The new photo, which New Horizons captured during its historic Pluto flyby on July 14, shows a startling complexity of terrain within Tombaugh Regio, researchers said.

"There is a pronounced difference in texture between the younger, frozen plains to the east and the dark, heavily cratered terrain to the west," Jeff Moore, leader of New Horizons' geology, geophysics and imaging team, said in a statement today (July 21) upon the photo's release.

"There's a complex interaction going on between the bright and the dark materials that we're still trying to understand," added Moore, who's based at at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

The lack of craters on Sputnik Planum suggests the icy plains are extremely young in geological terms - 100 million years or less, mission team members have said. But the darker terrain to the west is probably several billion years old.

Features as small as 0.5 miles (0.8 km) wide are visible in the new photo, which New Horizons took from a distance of 48,000 miles (77,000 km). But the spacecraft zoomed to within just 7,800 miles (12,500 km) of Pluto's surface on July 14, so even more spectacular images of the dwarf planet should be coming down to Earth in the future.

All of New Horizons' close-approach data should be in researchers' hands in compressed form by the end of 2015, while it may take another year to get the complete flyby dataset down to Earth, team members have said.

CS Monitor

Pluto: lofty haze, flowing ice, 'a dream come true'

Fresh data from New Horizons show smooth icy landscapes feathering into ancient, cratered terrains, providing signs of geological activity that could still be under way.

By Pete Spotts, Staff writer July 24, 2015   

New images from NASA's New Horizons mission to the Pluto-Charon system reveal that a vast icy plain, first seen in detail last week, sports glacier-like ice streams that spill into craters and encircle water-ice mountains - including a new range comparable in height to the Appalachian Mountains on Earth.

At the same time, close-ups of the dark equatorial region reveal a crater-pocked landscape within a portion of the region the team has dubbed Cthulhu Regio.

The contrasting landscape underscores Pluto's unexpected complexity, revealed when the New Horizons spacecraft swooped to within 7,800 miles of the dwarf planet's surface on July 14.

Even though portions of Pluto's surface show signs of geological activity that still could be underway today, "some parts of Pluto are fundamentally ancient," said William McKinnon, a planetary geophysicist at Washington University in St. Louis and a member of the New Horizons science team, during a briefing Friday.

"Pluto has a very complicated story to tell," added the mission's lead scientist, Alan Stern, with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. "There is a lot of work we need to do to understand this very complicated place."

So far, New Horizons has beamed back to data-hungry scientists only about 4 to 5 percent of the observations the craft's suite of seven instruments gathered during the historic flyby.

As if to underscore the level of patience the mission demands, from now to mid-September most of the data the craft is scheduled to return will focus on engineering information, although a smattering of science data will come with it. Once these data are in hand, the science spigot will reopen with a vengeance and flow for about a year.

Much of the new information focused on Pluto's big heart, which the team has informally named Tombaugh Regio. It's east and west lobes are strikingly different, Dr. Stern said. Ice deposits on the eastern lobe, as well as those that appear to be flowing out of the region's southern tip, look much thinner than those to the west, suggesting that the the western lobe is the source for the icy veneer covering geological features to the east and south.

A Texas-sized patch of this western lobe, Sputnik Planum, hosts the broad, polygon-shaped ice patches that look like garden pavers, revealed on June 17. But on the planum's northern and southern boundaries, these features appear to be flowing.

To the north, the ice buts up against what the team interprets as scarps leading to higher terrain. Researchers have detected what look to be ice streams flowing up to, then along, the scarp faces. In one location, nitrogen ice appears to be flowing into an ancient crater an impactor punched into the edge of the highlands. Its entry point appears to be a gap that erosion cut into the crater rim.

At Pluto's surface temperature of about minus 390 degrees Fahrenheit, water ice would be extremely hard and brittle. But ices of nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide "are soft and malleable, even at Pluto conditions," Dr. McKinnon said. "They will flow."

Researchers have known for years that Pluto's surface contained nitrogen ice, he noted.

"But to see evidence for recent geological activity is simply a dream come true," he added.

Sputnik Planum's smooth appearance, devoid of any impact craters, "tells us that this is a really a young unit," probably no older than a few tens of millions of years, McKinnon said. Based on modeling estimates of the heat coming from Pluto's interior - at temperatures still frigid by terrestrial standards - "there's no reason why this stuff cannot be going on today."

To the south, the ice appears to be flowing around mountains, including the new range the team has informally named Hillary Montes and feathering itself across lower elevations that make up Cthulhu Regio.

New Horizons also delivered surprises about Pluto's atmosphere, and confirmed that if Charon has one, it is exceedingly tenuous.

Regarding Pluto's atmosphere, New Horizons' data "are basically changing the way we think about Pluto's atmosphere," said Michael Summers, a researcher at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and another member of the New Horizons science team. "We're basically having to start from scratch."

Looking back at Pluto as it headed away from the planet and deeper into the Kuiper Belt, New Horizons revealed that the planet's haze - light scattered off of particles in the atmosphere - extended far higher than models had predicted. The haze also revealed a distinct structure to the atmosphere and even provided hints of weather features on Pluto, Dr. Summers noted.

The evidence for weather appears in layers of haze, one about 30 miles above the surface and the other some 50 miles high. The team also saw features that looked to some like waves.

Ultimately, the haze extends up to 80 miles above the surface, where atmospheric temperatures are relatively warm. Up there, the heat triggers reactions between methane and other molecules that form tiny, complex-hyrdocarbon particles known as tholins, which grow heavy enough to fall back to Pluto's surface. Previously, researchers thought that the tholins would form lower in the atmosphere, where temperatures are colder. These tholins are ruddy particles, thought to be responsible for Pluto's reddish tint.

Tholins also are likely to be responsible for the apparently ice-free equatorial region's distinctively dark regions - tholins baked by what, for Pluto, would be its tropical sun.

In addition, the atmosphere appears to be have flipped a switch, losing about half its mass in the past two years.

"That's pretty astonishing to an atmospheric scientist," Summer said.

Pluto has entered a stage in its orbit where it is heading away from the sun. Indeed, when the mission was still being evaluated by the planetary-science community, "there was a real interest in trying to get to Pluto while it still had a substantial atmosphere," Stern said. "We wanted to get there while there was still an atmosphere to study."

But between 1989 and two years ago, the atmosphere seemed stable, despite Pluto's outbound course. This led some to suggest that maybe the atmosphere doesn't collapse at Pluto heads toward its most distant point from the sun.

New Horizons appears to have detected what could be the first stages of that collapse, just as New Horizons arrived, Stern said.

"It would be an amazing coincidence, but there are some on our team who would say: I told you so," he said. "We'll see if this is, in fact, what's happening or if it's a more-complicated story."

CS Monitor

Astounding New Horizons photos reveal Pluto's atmosphere, surface

Spectacular new photos snapped by NASA's New Horizons space probe reveal flowing ices and a hazy atmosphere.

By Calla Cofield, SPACE.com July 27, 2015      

Stunning new images of Pluto by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft show flowing ices, a complicated surface covered in mountain ranges and a surprisingly far-reaching atmosphere. 

At a news conference today (July 24), members of the New Horizons team spoke about the incredible new science being pulled from data collected by the probe, which performed history's first flyby of Pluto on July 14. Among other findings, scientists announced big surprises in the study of Pluto's atmosphere, as well as the discovery of what appear to be flowing fields of ice in Pluto's "heart."

"Pluto has a very complicated story to tell," Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons, said at the news conference. "There is a lot of work that we need to do to understand this very complicated place."

Photos of Pluto and Its Moons: http://www.space.com/11431-photos-pluto-charon-moons-dwarf-planet.html

One of the new images released today is a gorgeous global view showing half of Pluto's surface, lit by sunlight, with the heart-shaped region informally known as Tombaugh Regio in the lower-left quadrant. The new image shows features on the surface as small as 1.4 miles (2.2 kilometers), or twice the resolution of a similar image released on July 13.

The image shows Pluto's surface in "true color," or as it would appear to the human eye. It combines data from New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) and Ralph instruments.

Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, appear together in a new, "true color" portrait that highlights the reddish hue of Pluto compared to Charon's gray tone. Scientists think Pluto's red color is the result of particles created in its atmosphere, through methane's interaction with UV light. The particles stick together, growing heavier, and eventually rain down on the surface.

On the other hand, new observations of Charon suggest that it has "much less atmosphere than Pluto, if any," Stern said. The probe will send back more data on Charon's atmosphere in September.

"For now, all that we can say is, it's a much more rarefied atmosphere [than Pluto's]," Stern said. "It may be that there's a thin nitrogen layer in the atmosphere, or methane, or some other constituent. But it must be very tenuous compared to Pluto - again, emphasizing just how different these two objects are despite their close association in space."

In a stunning image taken from beyond the far side of Pluto, in which the dwarf planet eclipses the sun, scientists can see a haze in the Plutonian atmosphere.

Click to view: http://www.space.com/18564-pluto-atmosphere.html

"This is one of our first images of Pluto's atmosphere. [It] stunned the encounter team," said Michael Summers, a New Horizons co-investigator based at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, at today's news conference. "For 25 years, we've known that Pluto has an atmosphere. But it's been known by numbers. This is our first picture. This is the first time we've really seen it. This was the image that almost brought tears to the eyes of the atmospheric scientists on our team."

The haze is created by the particles that scientists think eventually fall to the surface and give Pluto its reddish hue. The haze extends at least 100 miles (160 km) above the surface of Pluto, or five times higher than models predicted, according to Summers, who called the discovery "a big surprise." Scientists previously thought the upper layers of the atmosphere would be too warm for hazes to form, he said.

"We're going to need some new ideas to figure out what's going on," Summers said in a statement from NASA.

In another set of new images, scientists revealed what appears to be a wide field of glaciers flowing across Pluto's surface. The flowing ice field is easily spotted in images of the dwarf planet: It's the smooth, light-colored upper-left lobe of the heart-shaped region - an area unofficially known as Sputnik Planum.

Fly Over Pluto's Hillary Mountains and Sputnik Plain (Video): http://www.space.com/30045-fly-over-pluto-s-hillary-mountains-and-sputnik-plain-video.html

Scientists think that, unlike glaciers on Earth, the ice in Sputnik Planum is made of nitrogen, carbon monoxide and methane. At the frigid temperature of about minus 390 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 235 Celsius), water ice "won't move anywhere," because it is too rigid and brittle to flow, said Bill McKinnon, of Washington University in St. Louis, deputy leader of the New Horizons geology, geophysics and imaging team.

But even at such low temperatures, nitrogen, carbon dioxide and methane ices are "geologically soft and malleable," McKinnon said. At the news conference, McKinnon showed regions near the heart-shaped region's upper-left edge where the ice could be seen creeping around other geologic barriers and filling in craters. The images, he said, show "conclusive evidence" of ice flow that may still be happening on Pluto's surface today.

"To see evidence of recent geological activity is simply a dream come true," McKinnon said. "The appearance of this terrain, the utter lack of impact craters on Sputnik Planum, tells us that this is really a young unit."

McKinnon also noted another interesting finding that has surfaced from the New Horizons data: Pluto is very close to being perfectly spherical.

"We actually can't detect any obliqueness or out-of-roundness in the body," McKinnon said. Many other bodies in the solar system have distortions to their roundness, which "tells you about their history," he said.

"Pluto was probably spinning very, very fast after what we believe to be a giant impact that led to the formation of [Charon]," McKinnon added, noting that the gravitational pull of the two bodies on each other would have, over time, slowed down Pluto's rapid rotation.

The New Horizons space probe made its closest approach to Pluto on July 14. The entire data set that it collected during its flyby of the dwarf planet will take 16 months to download back to Earth. The wide variety of features on Pluto's surface poses many questions that will keep scientists busy for years to come, mission team members have said.

See Pluto's frozen 'heart' in amazing detail

NASA has stitched together a new false-color image from photos snapped by its New Horizons space probe during its historic flyby of the dwarf planet Pluto.

By Tariq Malik
SPACE.com July 28, 2015   

The mysterious face of Pluto is beginning to yield some of its secrets in this stunning false-color image from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which scientists can use to detect subtle differences in the dwarf planet's surface, including its icy "heart."

The new image of Pluto, released on Thursday (July 23), clearly shows the now familiar heart-shaped region nicknamed Tombaugh Regio. The photo is actually a combination of observations from the main camera on New Horizons (called LORRI) and the probe's visible/infrared imager (known as Ralph) which provided data for the colors in the view. The enhanced colors allow scientists to identify differences in the composition and texture of Pluto's surface, according to a NASA image description.

"The 'heart of the heart,' Sputnik Planum, is suggestive of a source region of ices,'" NASA officials wrote in the image description. Sputnik Planum is the vast plains region inside Pluto's heart-shaped feature. "The two bluish-white 'lobes' that extend to the southwest and northeast of the 'heart' may represent exotic ices being transported away from Sputnik Planum."

The New Horizons spacecraft captured this view in the days leading up to its historic July 14 flyby of Pluto.At the time, New Horizons was about 280,000 miles (450,000 kilometers) from the dwarf planet. Four images from the probe's LORRI camera (short for Longe Range Reconnaissance Imager) were combined with the color data from the Ralph instrument to create this view.

Pluto's heart-shaped region was named Tombaugh Region in honor of the late astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930 while working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.

NASA will unveil more new photos of Pluto from New Horizons later today at 2 p.m. EDT (1800 GMT) during a press conference at its headquarters in Washington, D.C. You can watch the Pluto webcast live on Space.com, courtesy of NASA TV.