NASA scientists on Friday published new images of the planet Pluto sent by the probe New Horizons, which does not cease to amaze. According to them, you see them vast areas of fog in the atmosphere and relatively young “river” of nitrogen ice.
– If you walk to the cardiologist, it’s better to go out of this room – joked chief project scientist Alan Stern opening press conference at NASA headquarters at Cape Canaveral. – We have some truly dizzying discoveries – he added.
The New Horizons probe, which flew on July 14 in just 12.5 thousand. km from Pluto, the dwarf planet located on the far outskirts of the solar system, supply the new photos. They show extensive layer of fog in the atmosphere of up to 160 km altitude. The researchers speculate that this was the mist gives the reddish planet.
An observer standing on the surface of Pluto and looking up, probably would not have noticed the mist – said Michael Summers of George Mason University. In fact, the probe detected a fog after distance from Pluto, when the sun hid behind the planet and podświetliło its atmosphere.
(Video: new suspicions of scientists with Pluto)
(Video: photo Plutina. Source: CNN Newsource / x-news)
“rivers of ice” nitric acid and nitric snow
Flowing “rivers of ice” seem to be relatively young. William McKinnon of Washington University, initially rated their age at only a few dozen million years. For comparison, Pluto and the solar system now account for approx. 4.5 billion years. That is why so recent activity on the surface is all the more astonishing – said the scientist.
The temperature on Pluto’s surface is minus 229 deg. Celsius and very thin atmosphere composed mostly of nitrogen, methane and carbon monoxide. At such a low temperature water ice could not move anywhere. However, according to McKinnon, “river” made up of nitrogen ice that behaves in such conditions as the glaciers on Earth.
Some of the “river” filled – seems to impact craters creating a lake of frozen nitrogen. One of these craters is the size of metropolitan Washington, DC – said McKinnon. On the planet rains probably also nitric snow.
According to the researcher, recent findings seem to confirm that beneath the frozen crust of the planet may be a liquid ocean.
(Source: CNN Newsource / x-news. Simulation fly over Pluto, developed by NASA)
Heart and mountains on Pluto
characteristic clear structure in the shape of heart on the surface of Pluto, Tombaugh Regio named in honor of the discoverer of the planet, the American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh. The left part of the “heart” is called Planum on the other hand Sputnik (Sputnik Plain), referring to the first artificial satellite of the Earth.
Two outdoor mountain ranges NASA scientists named Hillary and Tenzing to commemorate in this way the New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay’a who first climbed the highest mountain of the Earth – Mount Everest.
The probe, which is already approx. 7.5 million km from Pluto, has just begun to send the pictures and the resulting information. Sending them will take more than a year.
New Horizons is moving now into the Kuiper Belt, on the outskirts of circling Pluto. Scientists estimate that there be at least a few bodies similar in size to Pluto.
PAP / agkm
(Video: Pluto has become a popular topic on social networking site Twitter. 14 July at 13.49 Polish time the probe, New Horizons passed at a distance of 12 500 km of Pluto. This is the first time that the Earth’s machine came to such a distant subject. The probe entered the atmosphere of a celestial body, but still do a lot of measurements, including blood pressure and temperature. The collected data to Earth will reach over 4.5 hours. But it needs a radio signal to the remote 5.9 billion km of Pluto could reach the Blue Planet. But NASA for a few hours before the “zero hour” has published a very clear picture of the planet dwarf, which – according to many – is in atlases and encyclopedias under the slogan “Platoon”).
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