In a historic moment, NASA has unveiled the first truly close-up photos humanity has ever seen of Pluto and two of its moons, thanks to the New Horizons craft — and they’re astounding. It turns out Pluto is no drab gray rock. Check out the single close-up frame of Pluto’s surface above. It has incredible features, including mountains of water ice that are up to 11,000 feet tall, and it’s coated with a layer of methane and nitrogen ice. There are also zero visible impact craters, indicating that the surface can’t be more than 100 million years old or so — especially odd given the huge amount of debris in that part of the solar system.
“The mountains likely formed no more than 100 million years ago — mere youngsters relative to the 4.56-billion-year age of the solar system — and may still be in the process of building,” said Jeff Moore of New Horizons’ Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team (GGI), in a statement. “That suggests the close-up region, which covers less than one percent of Pluto’s surface, may still be geologically active today.”
There are no nearby planets to exert gravitational influence on Pluto, and no internal tidal forces known — in fact, Pluto is locked to Charon in that regard — so the mountains came from somewhere else. “This may cause us to rethink what powers geological activity on many other icy worlds,” said GGI deputy team leader John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. The close-up photo was taken when New Horizons was just 1.5 hours from its closest approach, roughly 478,000 miles away from Pluto’s surface.
NASA also revealed fresh details about Charon and its mountainous terrain. It turns out Pluto’s largest moon is a lot more active than expected, with visible east-west fault lines about 600 miles across, and surprisingly little cratering as well. The best part: The north polar region of Charon has a giant dark marking that NASA has been referring to as Mordor, which basically means they totally get us. The upper right seems to contain a canyon that’s several miles deep. The photo below was taken July 13 at a distance of 289,000 miles, or just further away than our moon is from the Earth:
Meanwhile, New Horizons project scientist Hal Weaver said Pluto’s moon Hydra measures just 28 by 19 miles across, appearing as “an elongated object, 30% larger in one dimension than the other.” It appears to be composed entirely of water ice as well. Uncompressed versions of both the moons are still stored in the craft’s memory, NASA said, and will soon be downloaded here to Earth.
Here’s a video showing how the Pluto image at the top of the story fits into the rest of the planet:
There’s sure to be even more data coming down from the spacecraft, but we wanted to get this all posted immediately, since it’s so amazing to us. For more on the New Horizons mission, read our earlier story on Pluto’s discovery and the history of our scientific endeavors to learn about this distant and fascinating object in our solar system. And if you’re so inclined, here’s a larger version of the photo at the top of the story, in the original aspect ratio; click to zoom in.
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