A stunning silhouette of Pluto taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft after it shot past the icy orb last week shows an extensive layer of atmospheric haze, while close-up pictures of the ground reveal flows of nitrogen ice, scientists said on Friday.
New Horizons became the first spacecraft to visit Pluto and its entourage of moons, and so far has returned about 5 percent of the pictures and data collected in the days leading up to, during and immediately following the July 14 flyby.
The latest images include a backlit view of Pluto with the sun, more than 4.8 billion kilometers away, shining around and through the planet’s atmosphere.
Photo: AFP
Analysis shows distinct layers of haze in Pluto’s nitrogen, carbon monoxide and methane atmosphere. The haze extends at least 161km off the surface.
“This is our first peek at weather in Pluto’s atmosphere,” New Horizons scientist Michael Summers told reporters during a teleconferenced media briefing.
As the tiny particles fall to the ground, they might trigger chemical reactions that give Pluto its reddish hue, he added.
The haze layer, which extends five times farther than predicted by computer models, was not the only surprise. Pressure measurements show the total mass of Pluto’s atmosphere has halved in two years.
“That’s pretty astonishing, at least to an atmospheric scientist. That tells you something is happening,” Summers said.
NASA also released new images of Pluto’s surface, with telltale signs of a wide range of geologic activity, including a Pluto version of glacial flows.
With surface temperatures at about minus-235oC, Pluto is too cold for the ice to be made of water. Instead, Pluto’s surface ice consists mostly of nitrogen.
“We knew that there was nitrogen ice on Pluto ... and we imagined that nitrogen was sublimating, or evaporating, in one place and condensing in another place, but to see evidence for recent geologic activity is simply a dream come true,” said New Horizons scientist William McKinnon, with Washington University in St Louis.
Based on the lack of impact craters, scientists suspect the surface of Pluto is less than a few hundred million years old, a number dramatically revised after the spacecraft’s arrival and the data it has sent back.
Some of that Plutonian ice seems to have emptied into impact craters, creating ponds of frozen nitrogen. One of those semi-filled craters is about the size of metropolitan Washington, McKinnon said.
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