Pretend I'm A Planetary Scientist Instead Of An Astronomer - Blog Posts

And here they are! The first hi resolution images released by NASA from yesterday’s flawless flyby of Pluto.

The close-up is a view of a region on Pluto at the bottom of ‘the heart’, the feature seen on the pre-approach image posted on July 14, yesterday, at 7:23 am. It reveals a smooth area in the upper left, a hummocky region in the lower right, and in between mountains that are 11,000 feet high! The only material on Pluto that is strong enough to build mountains is water ice. The other volatiles, nitrogen and methane, which are escaping Pluto as vapor, are apparently no more than a thin veneer. This image has a resolution of ~ 1 mile/pixel.

The other image is Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, about ½ the size of Pluto, seen at an image scale of ~ 3 miles/pixel. It surprises in several ways: a long chasm reminiscent of Saturn’s moon Tethys, a variable surface appearance, and very few craters that indicate a relatively youthful surface.

How mind-blowing it is that we are today discussing processes operating at 32x farther from the Sun than is the Earth, and over 3x farther away than Saturn. And yesterday, it was just a dream.

Think about that! CICLOPS.org: The Icy Mountains of Pluto CICLOPS.org: Charon’s Surprising Youthful and Varied Terrain