![]() The idea of a subsurface ocean has existed for some time, but the far-side images have helped to bolster this idea. The weight of the new water and ice created a heavy load that tipped Pluto into its current alignment 2. Afterwards, nitrogen gas in Pluto’s atmosphere condensed and froze in the frigid basin. Instead, models suggest that when the basin formed, an underground ocean began to well up into the chasm. It could be an accident, but the likelihood of that is a mere 5%. Shortly after the first images of the near side arrived at Earth, Francis Nimmo, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his colleagues realized that Sputnik Planitia was in a strange place: it is aligned almost exactly opposite Pluto’s largest moon, Charon. The heart might have even knocked Pluto on its side. As sunlight warms the frozen plain, a pulse of ice sublimates into vapour that wafts upwards, before dropping back down at the end of the day. Within the heart’s ‘left ventricle’ is Sputnik Planitia - an icy basin, churning and flowing with massive glaciers, that scientists now know exerts an extraordinary influence over Pluto’s activity. It was a tantalizing hint that suggested Pluto might be a dynamic world - and was quickly verified in July 2015 when New Horizons famously spotted a heart-shaped feature just north of the near side’s equator. “Pluto is the gift that keeps on giving,” says Richard Binzel, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and a New Horizons co-investigator.Ī mosaic of images shows the parts of Pluto captured in high resolution, called the near side, and the lower resolution ‘far side’. This makes their origin one of the biggest mysteries on the dwarf planet. The skyscraper-like shards of ice, for example, were previously seen on the near side, but now appear to circle Pluto. ![]() The data even bolster the argument that the chilly world just might be fit for life.īut the images present a set of puzzles. With hundreds of images to analyse, scientists have a new view 1 of this active world - one that provides crucial insight into the hazy details of how it formed, whether there’s an ocean hiding beneath its icy crust and the complex ways that compounds freeze out of the atmosphere and sculpt its surface. ![]() “And it’s the best we’ll have for another 30–40 years.” (That’s assuming another spacecraft is sent to Pluto, and soon.) “It’s still really juicy data to look at,” says Harold Weaver, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and a New Horizons project scientist. ![]() ![]() At best, that’s 250 times better than the pictures shot by the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. Researchers call that hemisphere the far side, or even the dark side.Īlthough the images aren’t as clear as those taken later (in which features as small as roughly 75 metres can be seen), they still reveal terrain at resolutions ranging from 2 to 30 kilometres. Now that scientists have scrutinized those ‘near-side’ close-ups, they are beginning to analyse the other half, which the spacecraft photographed days before it shot past. The other was temporarily shrouded in shadow. When New Horizons reached the dwarf planet, the craft was moving at 52,000 kilometres per hour, so fast it was able to capture close-ups of only one side of Pluto - the hemisphere that the Sun illuminated at the time. ![]()
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