Learning More About Pluto
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From the Left
Mountains on Pluto, chasms on Charon thrill scientistsPost-flyby images from NASA's New Horizons probe show Pluto is a surprisingly active world in the deep freeze of the outer solar system, with jagged 11,000-foot-high mountains of frozen water dusted with a veneer of nitrogen, methane and carbon monoxide ice amid smooth plains and jumbled terrain that defies easy explanation, scientists reported Wednesday.
A distinct paucity of impact craters implies processes at work now or in the geologically recent past that have resurfaced large areas of Pluto, smoothing out the pockmarks so familiar on other small bodies. What powers...
From the Center
OPINION: What New Horizons reveals about PlutoUnless you have been, well, on another planet, you know that July 14 was the date of closest approach to Pluto by the New Horizons spacecraft, which has now sent back unprecedented images from this historic encounter.
Passing Pluto at barely 7,750 miles (or 12,400 kilometers for savvy metric readers), the seven experiments on the New Horizons spacecraft are busily gathering extensive data on Pluto and its five known moons, Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra.
From the Right
NASA releases first Pluto flyby imagesNASA has released the first images taken during New Horizons’ historic flyby of dwarf planet Pluto.
“We have got a whole bunch of high-resolution observations safely on the spacecraft,” said New Horizons’ Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team Leader John Spencer, during a press conference at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, which is managing the mission. “We’re now focusing on small details on this amazing world.”
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