Views of Pluto have remained the same over the decades since NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, not any more revealing than the telescopes used by astronomer Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 when the planet was discovered. But according to a release in the journal Science, New Horizons astronomers have a more detailed perspective gathered from last summer’s flyby Phys.org reports.
Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colo., said,”These five detailed papers completely transform our view of Pluto – revealing the former ‘astronomer’s planet’ to be a real world with diverse and active geology, exotic surface chemistry, a complex atmosphere, puzzling interaction with the sun and an intriguing system of small moons.”
The New Horizons space mission was a 9.5-year, 3-billion-mile trek that dashed by Pluto on July 14, 2015. Digital cameras captured 50 gigabytes of data over the course of 9 days. Up close encounters revealed a heart-shaped feature sculpted into Pluto’s surface. This feature exposes a new intrigue, a planet that exists in a distant “third zone” of our solar system within the Kuiper Belt.
The complete findings in the Science journal can be viewed here.
“Observing Pluto and Charon up close has caused us to completely reassess thinking on what sort of geological activity can be sustained on isolated planetary bodies in this distant region of the solar system, worlds that formerly had been thought to be relics little changed since the Kuiper Belt’s formation,” said Jeff Moore from NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California and lead author.
Researchers now have close-up images of Pluto’s small moons, Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra as another source of study. Initially discovered between 2005 and 2012, the four moons vary in diameter from 25 miles for Nix and Hydra to six miles Styx and Kerberos. The moons were also discovered to have unusual rotations and unusually identical pole orientations, in addition to icy surfaces and gleaming colors distinct from Pluto and Charon.
Apparently, the moons are mergers of smaller bodies and their surfaces stretch back to at least 4 billion years.”These latter two results reinforce the hypothesis that the small moons formed in the aftermath of a collision that produced the Pluto-Charon binary system,” said Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, and lead author on Pluto’s small moons.