PLUTO: Amazing new HD images from NASA!

New close-up images of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft reveal a bewildering variety of surface features that have scientists reeling because of their range and complexity.
“Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we’ve seen in the solar system,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado. “If an artist had painted this Pluto before our flyby, I probably would have called it over the top — but that’s what is actually there.”
New Horizons began its yearlong download of new images and other data over the Labor Day weekend. Images downlinked in the past few days have more than doubled the amount of Pluto’s surface seen at resolutions as good as 400 meters (440 yards) per pixel. They reveal new features as diverse as possible dunes, nitrogen ice flows that apparently oozed out of mountainous regions onto plains, and even networks of valleys that may have been carved by material flowing over Pluto’s surface. They also show large regions that display chaotically jumbled mountains reminiscent of disrupted terrains on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa.

“The surface of Pluto is every bit as complex as that of Mars,” said Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. “The randomly jumbled mountains might be huge blocks of hard water ice floating within a vast, denser, softer deposit of frozen nitrogen within the region informally named Sputnik Planum.”
New images also show the most heavily cratered -- and thus oldest -- terrain yet seen by New Horizons on Pluto next to the youngest, most crater-free icy plains. There might even be a field of dark wind-blown dunes, among other possibilities.
“Seeing dunes on Pluto -- if that is what they are -- would be completely wild, because Pluto’s atmosphere today is so thin,” said William B. McKinnon, a GGI deputy lead from Washington University, St. Louis. “Either Pluto had a thicker atmosphere in the past, or some process we haven’t figured out is at work. It’s a head-scratcher.”
Discoveries being made from the new imagery are not limited to Pluto’s surface. Better images of Pluto’s moons Charon, Nix, and Hydra will be released Friday at the raw images site for New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), revealing that each moon is unique and that big moon Charon’s geological past was a tortured one.
Images returned in the past days have also revealed that Pluto’s global atmospheric haze has many more layers than scientists realized, and that the haze actually creates a twilight effect that softly illuminates nightside terrain near sunset, making them visible to the cameras aboard New Horizons.
“This bonus twilight view is a wonderful gift that Pluto has handed to us,” said John Spencer, a GGI deputy lead from SwRI. “Now we can study geology in terrain that we never expected to see.”

http://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-pluto-images-from-nasa-s-new-horizons-it-s-complicated

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Pluto ‘Wows’ in Spectacular New Backlit Panorama

The latest images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft have scientists stunned – not only for their breathtaking views of Pluto’s majestic icy mountains, streams of frozen nitrogen and haunting low-lying hazes, but also for their strangely familiar, arctic look.



http://www.nasa.gov/feature/pluto-wows-in-spectacular-new-backlit-panorama

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multiple said:

yea I was watching the live broadcast on nasa tv as it was doing the flyby approach. fantastic pictures muchacho, hadn't seen these close up shots of the planets surface, that haze photo is beautiful. thanks for sharing.

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Blaze said:

I wonder if living on Pluto could be possible. With all that ice there I'd assume a yes would be likely, but the Sun's rays don't really reach Pluto (from what I know), so how would we grow food or obtain vitamin D?

Maybe by then we'll have technology do that for us, heh, who knows. Cool pictures though.

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From Pluto, the Sun is fainter than it is from Earth, but still can be 450x brighter than the full Moon.

I remember reading a science fiction story many years ago which took place on Pluto. The author described the Sun as being so faint that it looked like just another bright star (too bad I don’t remember the name of the story anymore). I was thinking about that again recently, and wondered just how bright the Sun does look from Pluto. This turns out to be pretty easy to calculate!

[...]



The Earth orbits the Sun, on average, at a distance of about 150 million km. Pluto has a very elliptical orbit, but has an average distance of about 5.9 billion kilometers, or roughly 39 times the Earth’s distance from the Sun. Using the method above, the Sun must be 392 = about 1500 times fainter, or more grammatically correctly, 0.00065 times as bright. That’s pretty faint!


Or is it? Well, let’s compare that to how bright the full Moon looks from Earth. To us here at home, the Sun is about 400,000 times brighter than the full Moon, so even from distant, frigid Pluto, on average the Sun would look more than 250 times brighter than the full Moon does from Earth!

Pluto’s orbit is also highly elliptical, stretching from 4.4 billion km to just over 7.3 billion km from the Sun. Doing the math again, that means the Sun goes from being 0.0012 to 0.0004 as bright as it is from Earth: a range of roughly 150 to 450 times as bright as the Moon from Earth. That’s a change in brightness by a factor of three!


Still, given that you can read by the light of the full Moon, obviously the Sun from Pluto is still pretty dang intense. It would hardly look like just any other star: it would greatly outshine everything else in the sky. Painful to look at, most likely. So the short story I read was wrong, but at least we learned something. That’s a decent trade.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/b...bafact-math-how-bright-is-the-sun-from-pluto/

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