Since then, data collected on Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, has been used to obtain information about these planetary bodies 4 billion miles from Earth.
New Horizons launched in January 2006 and reached Pluto in July 2015, flying 7,800 miles from Pluto’s surface.
And instead of being an icy and calm dwarf planet, the data collected by New Horizons revealed that Pluto is actually very active.
New Horizons has completely changed the way scientists understand Pluto, and mission data continues to help researchers unravel secrets about the distant dwarf planet, as well as the icy objects that orbit along the edge of our system. solar.
“New Horizons transformed Pluto from a diffuse, telescopic spot into a living world with surprising diversity and surprising complexity,” Hal Weaver said in a statement.
Weaver is the New Horizons project scientist at the Johns Hopkins Laboratory of Applied Physics, which designed, built, and operates the spacecraft.
“The encounter with Pluto was exploration at its best, a true tribute to the vision and persistence of the New Horizons team,” he said.
New Horizons Revelations
Pluto is small but powerful, smaller than our moon and only about 1,400 miles wide, or half the width of the United States. Charon, the largest of Pluto’s five moons, is so similar in size to Pluto that they orbit each other like a double planet system.
If you were standing on the surface of Pluto, which has an average negative temperature of 387 degrees Fahrenheit, you would see blue skies, red snow, and mountains that rise like the Rocky Mountains, according to NASA. New Horizons also revealed the strange mechanics of Pluto’s “beating” heart-shaped glacier, similar in size to Texas, which explains the planet’s exaggerated tilt and even helps propel the wind over Pluto.
The heart-shaped feature is known as Tombaugh Regius, named after the astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930.
Much of the dwarf planet’s nitrogen ice content can be found in this region, concentrated in a deep basin called Sputnik Planitia because the elevation is 1.9 miles lower than the surface. The ice sheet covers 620 miles. The basin constitutes the “left lobe” of the heart, while the right side houses nitrogen glaciers and highlands.
During the day, Pluto’s frozen nitrogen heart warms up enough to turn into steam. At night, it is condensing and returning to ice again. Researchers call this Pluto’s “heartbeat,” which controls the atmospheric circulation of nitrogen winds around the planet.
Some scientists also believe that there is a liquid ocean below Pluto’s ice sheet that is estimated to be 249 miles thick. But they thought it was formed later in Pluto’s history when radioactive elements heated up near the dwarf planet’s rocky core and decomposed. This heat might have been enough to melt the ice and form a subsurface ocean.
But the New Horizons data suggests otherwise. New research based on those data has suggested that Pluto actually started in a hot formation scenario. In that scenario, the liquid ocean would slowly freeze over time, though not entirely, and would cause the extensional faults seen by New Horizons in Pluto’s icy crust.
This slow and prolonged freezing of the subsurface ocean could also explain the combination of features on Pluto’s surface because the expansion would occur throughout the history of the dwarf planet.
New Horizons images of Pluto and Charon also revealed chip-marked surfaces. They are covered with large craters.
The craters reveal that the small Kuiper Belt objects less than 100 kilometers in size probably created them when they collided with Pluto and Charon. And because of what scientists know about the formation of impact craters, the fact that no craters less than 13 kilometers in diameter were found means that there are fewer Kuiper Belt objects less than 2 kilometers away from astronomers. they had predicted.
This provides further support for the idea that the Kuiper Belt objects are not collision pieces of space rock, but actual intact “debris” from when the solar system was forming billions of years ago.
Pluto also has other amazing features, like the dunes. But these are not like the sand dunes on Earth; Pluto’s dunes are made of solid grains of methane ice and sculpted by the wind. Within our solar system, dunes are rarer than you think. They exist only on Earth, Mars, Venus, Saturn’s moon, Titan, and Comet 67P.
These dunes are largely intact in Pluto’s icy crust, suggesting that they formed in the past 500,000 years, or even more recently. Pluto presents an age conundrum in this way.
The dwarf planet has polygonal shapes and characteristics that indicate that the surface is geologically active and young. The surface itself is only about 500,000 years old, although the dwarf planet itself is approximately 4.5 billion years old. This activity is probably due to a thermal and convective overturning of the ice.
These are just a few of the discoveries made with the data provided by New Horizons, and even more will be made in the future as scientists analyze the wealth of information provided by the flyby.
“It is clear to me that the solar system saved the best for last!” Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons at the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement. “We couldn’t have explored a more fascinating or scientifically important planet on the edge of our solar system. The New Horizons team worked for 15 years to plan and execute this flyby, and Pluto paid us in swords!”
Whats Next
In January 2019, New Horizons made the first flyby of a distant Kuiper Belt object, which has since been called Arrokoth, allowing researchers to study these formation remnants of the solar system in detail.
New Horizons continues to explore the far reaches of our solar system, sharing its unique view of the stars billions of miles from Earth. In the meantime, it is receiving exploration assistance from a ground-based telescope.
The Subaru telescope, located on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, is operated by the Japan National Astronomical Observatory. You are helping to search for potential target candidates for New Horizons to look below.
“We are using the Subaru telescope because it is the best in the world for our search purposes,” said Stern. “This is due to its unique combination of telescope size, one of the largest in the world, and Hyper Suprime-Cam’s wide field of view, which can discover many Kuiper Belt objects at once.”
Subaru is currently observing an area in the Sagittarius constellation where New Horizons is located. Subaru’s observation team hopes to find hundreds of new objects from the Kuiper belt, with 50 that should be at the correct distance from New Horizons to be observed.
They can find another that is perfectly placed for an overflight, such as Arrokoth.
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