NASA has just released the most astounding images of Pluto and its moon, Charon, after having received data collected by New Horizons on its flyby missions. These pictures, uncompressed and without pixelation or blurriness, show us an amazing view of the dwarf planet’s surface, revealing Pluto’s landscape to be as complex as that of Mars.
Alan Stern, Principal Investigator for New Horizons, declares in a statement that these images, spectra and other data types will ultimately help researchers understand the origin and evolution of Pluto and its system for the first time. What’s lies ahead is not only the remaining 95% of data that’s still left in the spacecraft, but also the most important data: the highest resolution images and the most pivotal datasets. In other words, the real treasure trove is still waiting to be uncovered.
Varied Geology
The images, Stern adds, highlight a diversity and complexity in geological processes, which rival anything that has been seen in our solar system thus far. Pluto’s surface, for example, encompasses mountains, nitrogen ice flows and possible dunes, giving it much more diversity than was initially anticipated. Even Charon, pictured below, displays giant canyons:
New Horizons is broadcasting back data through NASA’s Deep Space Network, a series of large radio dishes in California, Spain and Australia, which serve a variety of spacecraft. The customary downlink rate ranges between 1 and 4 kilobits per second, and communication is far from instant. New Horizons is currently about 3 billion miles from planet Earth, so it takes about 4.5 hours to send a signal from the probe (currently moving at the speed of light) to Earth.
The Future of New Horizons — This is Only the Beginning
Members of the mission naturally have high hopes for the completed data. The success of the New Horizons mission requires a large investment in time and a lot of patience, but the results of the past two years surely indicate that the project was well worth the wait, according to Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist. The probe is not done generating data, and it will continue to give NASA and the world more information as it progresses on its mission to object 2014 MU69, one billion miles beyond Pluto.
