[meteorite-list] From Mountains to Moons: Multiple Discoveries from NASA's New Horizons Pluto Mission

[Ron Baalke]

July 15, 2015

RELEASE 15-152

>From Mountains to Moons: Multiple Discoveries from NASA's New Horizons Pluto Mission 

Icy mountains on Pluto and a new, crisp view of its largest moon, Charon,
are among the several discoveries announced Wednesday by the NASA's New 
Horizons team, just one day after the spacecraft's first ever Pluto flyby.

"Pluto New Horizons is a true mission of exploration showing us why basic 
scientific research is so important," said John Grunsfeld, associate 
administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "The 
mission has had nine years to build expectations about what we would see 
during closest approach to Pluto and Charon. Today, we get the first sampling 
of the scientific treasure collected during those critical moments, and I can 
tell you it dramatically surpasses those high expectations."

"Home run!" said Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons at 
the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. "New Horizons 
is returning amazing results already. The data look absolutely gorgeous, and 
Pluto and Charon are just mind blowing."

A new close-up image of an equatorial region near the base of Pluto's 
bright heart-shaped feature shows a mountain range with peaks jutting as 
high as 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) above the surface of the icy body.

The mountains on Pluto likely formed no more than 100 million years ago -- 
mere youngsters in a 4.56-billion-year-old solar system. This suggests the 
close-up region, which covers about one percent of Pluto's surface, may 
still be geologically active today.

"This is one of the youngest surfaces we've ever seen in the solar 
system," said Jeff Moore of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and 
Imaging Team (GGI) at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, 
California. 

Unlike the icy moons of giant planets, Pluto cannot be heated by 
gravitational interactions with a much larger planetary body. Some other 
process must be generating the mountainous landscape.

"This may cause us to rethink what powers geological activity on many other 
icy worlds," says GGI deputy team leader John Spencer at SwRI.

The new view of Charon reveals a youthful and varied terrain. Scientists are 
surprised by the apparent lack of craters. A swath of cliffs and troughs 
stretching about 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) suggests widespread fracturing 
of Charon's crust, likely the result of internal geological processes. The 
image also shows a canyon estimated to be 4 to 6 miles (7 to 9 kilometers) 
deep. In Charon's north polar region, the dark surface markings have a 
diffuse boundary, suggesting a thin deposit or stain on the surface.

New Horizons also observed the smaller members of the Pluto system, which 
includes four other moons: Nix, Hydra, Styx and Kerberos. A new sneak-peak 
image of Hydra is the first to reveal its apparent irregular shape and 
its size, estimated to be about 27 by 20 miles (43 by 33 kilometers).

The observations also indicate Hydra's surface is probably coated with water 
ice. Future images will reveal more clues about the formation of this and the 
other moon billions of years ago. Spectroscopic data from New Horizons' 
Ralph instruments reveal an abundance of methane ice, but with striking 
differences among regions across the frozen surface of Pluto.

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland 
designed, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the 
mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. SwRI leads the mission, 
science team, payload operations and encounter science planning. New Horizons 
is part of NASA's New Frontiers Program, managed by the agency's Marshall 
Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Follow the New Horizons mission on Twitter and use the hashtag 
#PlutoFlyby to join the conversation. Live updates also will be available on 
the mission Facebook page .

For more information on the New Horizons mission, including fact sheets, 
schedules, video and all the new images, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons

and

http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/plutotoolkit.cfm


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