The New Horizons spacecraft took this new image of Pluto on July 14, almost a decade after the mission launched, shortly before the spacecraft’s closest approach to Pluto at a distance of 478,000 miles away. The latest close-up image reveals a young, pointy mountain range that’s about 11,000 feet high. Members of the New Horizons team believe this region, which covers less than 1% of Pluto’s surface, is no more than 100 million years old — a youngster compared to the 4.56-billion-year age of the Solar System.
Scientists expected Pluto to be heavily pocked with craters, i.e. from billions of years’ worth of pummeling by space rocks. Instead, they discovered the dwarf planet’s surface to be relatively free of craters. “We have not yet found a single impact crater on this image,” said John Spencer, one of the co-investigators on the New Horizons team in a press conference. “This means that Pluto has a very young surface.” But that doesn’t mean it’s smooth. The mountain range is about as tall as the Rocky Mountains here on Earth.
Those are both signs that the dwarf planet is geologically active. But what type of process is making Pluto’s surface geologically active? One theory is that radiation in the planet keeps it warm and active. Another possibility is a thawing and freezing ocean just under Pluto’s surface, the researchers said during a NASA press conference. Pluto is “going to send a lot of geophysicists back to the drawing boards,” said Alan Stern, the team’s principle investigator from the Southwest Research Institute. “We haven’t found geysers and we haven’t found cryovolcanoes, but this is very strong evidence that will send us looking … for evidence of these exact phenomena.”
These preliminary images of Pluto have far exceeded the expectations of the team — and there’s still a lot more to learn about this world…..
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Image: NASA-JHUAPL-SwRI