Keep the shuttle flying: Fwd: Pluto probe’s camera sees striking geologic boundary

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From: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Date: July 22, 2015 at 9:33:19 AM CDT
To: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Subject: FW: Pluto probe's camera sees striking geologic boundary

July 21, 2015
M15-112
NASA Views Complex World: New Horizons Pluto Science Update Set for July 24
A newly discovered mountain range lies near the southwestern margin of Pluto's Tombaugh Regio (Tombaugh Region), situated between bright, icy plains and dark, heavily-cratered terrain. This image was acquired by New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on July 14, 2015 from a distance of 48,000 miles (77,000 kilometers) and received on Earth on July 20. Features as small as a half-mile (1 kilometer) across are visible.
Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI
Members of NASA's New Horizons team will hold a science update at 2 p.m. EDT Friday, July 24, to reveal new images and discuss latest science results from the spacecraft's historic July 14 flight through the Pluto system.
The briefing will be held in the James E. Webb Auditorium at NASA Headquarters, located at 300 E St. SW in Washington. NASA Television and the agency's website will carry the briefing live.
The briefing participants are:
Jim Green, director of Planetary Science at NASA Headquarters
Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado
Michael Summers, New Horizons co-investigator at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia
William McKinnon, New Horizons co-investigator at Washington University in St. Louis
Cathy Olkin, New Horizons deputy project scientist at SwRI
Media may ask questions by telephone. To participate by phone, reporters must send an email providing their name, affiliation and telephone number to Felicia Chou at felicia.chou@nasa.gov by noon Friday. Media and the public also may ask questions during the briefing on Twitter using the hashtag #askNASA.
For NASA TV streaming video, scheduling and downlink information, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv
For more information on the New Horizons mission, including fact sheets, schedules, video and images, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons
-end-
Dwayne Brown / Laurie Cantillo
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1726 / 202-358-1077
dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov / laura.l.cantillo@nasa.gov
Mike Buckley
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md.
240-228-7536
michael.buckley@jhuapl.edu
Maria Stothoff
Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio
210-522-3305
maria.stothoff@swri.org
Last Updated: July 22, 2015
Editor: Gina Anderson

Pluto probe's camera sees striking geologic boundary
July 21, 2015 by Stephen Clark
A newly discovered mountain range lies near the southwestern margin of Pluto's Tombaugh Regio (Tombaugh Region), situated between bright, icy plains and dark, heavily-cratered terrain. This image was acquired by New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on July 14, 2015 from a distance of 48,000 miles (77,000 kilometers) and sent back to Earth on July 20. Features as small as a half-mile (1 kilometer) across are visible. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI
New views of Pluto's unexpectedly complicated landscapes are coming back to Earth, revealing stark intersections between freshly-made bright icy plains and heavily-cratered darker terrain.
One image from the New Horizons spacecraft's telescopic black-and-white camera appears to show a clash of geologic units. On the left, impact craters dot a patch of older, darker material. On the right, a brighter ice field is criss-crossed with troughs and veins and a mountain range as high as the Appalachian Mountains in the eastern United States, a tapestry of topography that appears to resemble some sites in Antarctica.
The mountains are just west of the Sputnik Planum region in Pluto's heart, an area informally named Tombaugh Regio after astronomy Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered the distant icy dwarf in 1930. Scientists discussed the first up-close view of Sputnik Planum, which appears to be made of blocks of ice, during a press conference Friday.
The newly-discovered peaks are about 68 miles, or 110 kilometers, northwest of Norgay Montes, a string of higher mountains as big as the Rocky Mountains revealed in images last week.
"There is a pronounced difference in texture between the younger, frozen plains to the east and the dark, heavily-cratered terrain to the west," said Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons geology, geophysics and imaging team at NASA's Ames Research Center in California. "There's a complex interaction going on between the bright and the dark materials that we're still trying to understand."
"While Sputnik Planum is believed to be relatively young in geological terms — perhaps less than 100 million years old — the darker region probably dates back billions of years," NASA said in a statement accompanying the image release. "Moore notes that the bright, sediment-like material appears to be filling in old craters (for example, the bright circular feature to the lower left of center)."
Another press briefing updating the science results from the July 14 flyby is scheduled for Friday, July 24.
The image has a resolution of about a half mile, or approximately a kilometer. Moore says almost all of Pluto's sunlit hemisphere at the time of the New Horizons encounter was to be imaged at comparable half-mile resolution, but all the photos will not arrive on Earth until next year due to the low-speed, 2-kilobit per second data rate between the ground and the faraway space probe.
The snapshots currently coming down from New Horizons are compressed, and the spacecraft could start broadcasting raw files this fall.
The sharpest imagery from New Horizons' flyby, which could spot features smaller than a football field, is still stored in the probe's data recorders awaiting downlink to Earth.

Pluto's moons Nix and Hydra resolved
July 21, 2015 by Stephen Clark
New views of Nix and Hydra, two of Pluto's four smallest moons, show the tiny worlds in detail for the first time. The color image of Nix is from data obtained by the Ralph instrument on New Horizons from July 14 at a range of 102,000 miles. The spacecraft's higher-resolution LORRI instrument collected the black-and-white image of Hydra on July 14 at a range of 143,000 miles. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI
Two of Pluto's mini-moons, the mysterious Nix and Hydra, have transitioned from featureless points of light into their own worlds with new imagery from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft.
The two moons, discovered in a Hubble Space Telescope in 2005, are about the same size. An image of Nix with exaggerated colors makes the tiny moon look like a jelly bean. A red bull's-eye feature in the color data could be a signature of an impact crater, according to New Horizons' mission scientists.
"Additional compositional data has already been taken of Nix, but is not yet downlinked," said Carly Howett, mission scientist from the Southwest Research Institute. "It will tell us why this region is redder than its surroundings. This observation is so tantalizing, I'm finding it hard to be patient for more Nix data to be downlinked."
The July 14 flyby of Pluto by New Horizons yielded the first views of Nix and Hydra, revealing their shapes and appearances for the first time.
Nix is mostly gray in natural color, and it is about 26 miles (42 kilometers) long and 22 miles (36 kilometers) wide, according to a statement accompanying a NASA image release.
Hydra's shape is more irregular, and scientists compared it to the shape of the state of Michigan. Imagery of Hydra from New Horizons' telescopic black-and-white camera apparently show at least two craters on the moon, and reveal Hydra to be about 34 miles (55 kilometers) long and 25 miles (40 kilometers) wide.
"Before last week, Hydra was just a faint point of light, so it's a surreal experience to see it become an actual place, as we see its shape and spot recognizable features on its surface for the first time," said Ted Stryk, mission science collaborator from Roane State Community College in Tennessee.
Going into last week's Pluto encounter, many scientists believed the distant world's five moons were created from a single large impact with ancient Pluto. Charon, Pluto's largest moon, is about 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) across .
The speedy space probe also observed Pluto's two smallest moons, Styx and Kerberos, during the flyby. But those images will not be downlinked to Earth until as late as mid-October.
New Horizons searched for undiscovered moons on the final approach to Pluto, but data analyzed so far show no signs of any other satellites, a surprise to leaders of the science team.

© 2015 Spaceflight Now Inc.

Pluto's Moons Nix and Hydra Get Real / New Pluto Mountain Range Discovered
by Bob King on July 21, 2015

Pluto's moon Nix (left), shown here in enhanced color, has a reddish spot that has attracted the interest of mission scientists. The photo was taken on July 14, 2015 when New Horizons was about 102,000 miles (165,000 km) from Nix and shows features as small as about 2 miles (3 km) across. Hydra (right) was photographed with the LORRI instrument from a distance of about 143,000 miles (231,000 km). Features as small as 0.7 miles (1.2 km) are visible. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
Of course they've always been real worlds. They just never looked that way. We've only known of their existence since 2005, when astronomers with the Pluto Companion Search Team spotted them using the Hubble Space Telescope. Never more than faint points of light, each is now revealed as a distinct, if tiny, world.
"Before last week, Hydra was just a faint point of light, so it's a surreal experience to see it become an actual place, as we see its shape and spot recognizable features on its surface for the first time," said New Horizons mission science collaborator Ted Stryk.
Nix and Hydra compared to "giants" Pluto and its largest moon Charon. Pluto measures 1,473 miles in diameter and Charon 790 miles. A. Stern (SwRI) and Z. Levay (STScI)
Nix looks like a strawberry-flavored jelly bean, but that reddish region with its vaguely bulls-eye shape hints at a possible crater on this 26 miles (42 km) long by 22 miles (36 km) wide moon. Hydra, which measures 34 x 25 miles (55 x 40 km), displays two large craters, one tilted to face the Sun (top) and the other almost fully in shadow. Differences in brightness across Hydra suggest differences in surface composition.
Now we've seen three of Pluto' family of five satellites. Expect images of Pluto's most recently discovered moons, Styx and Kerberos, to be transmitted to Earth no later than mid-October.
Formation of Pluto's moons. 1: a Kuiper belt object approaches Pluto; 2: it impacts Pluto; 3: a dust ring forms around Pluto; 4: the debris aggregates to form Charon; 5: Pluto and Charon relax into spherical bodies. Smaller pieces became the irregularly-shaped moons Nix, Hydra, Kerberos and Styx. Credit: Wikipedia
All of Pluto's satellites are believed to have been created in what's now referred to as "The Big Whack", a long-ago collision between Pluto and another planetary body. A similar scenario probably played out at Earth as well, leading to the formation of our own Moon. In Pluto's case, most of the material pulled together to form Charon; the leftover chips became the smaller satellites. Their sizes are too small for self-gravity to crush them into spheres, hence their irregular shapes. The moons' neatly circular orbits about Pluto suggest they formed together rather than being captured willy-nilly from the Kuiper Belt.
A newly discovered mountain range lies near the southwestern margin of Pluto's Tombaugh Regio (Tombaugh Region), situated between bright, icy plains and dark, heavily-cratered terrain (left). This image taken on July 14, 2015 from a distance of 48,000 miles (77,000 km) and received on Earth on July 20. Features as small as a half-mile (1 km) across are visible.
Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI
Update: This just in. Take a look at this new close-up of Pluto that features a newly discovered mountain range in southwestern Tombaugh Regio. Sure looks like ice flows. This is a complex little dwarf planet!

Second Mountain Range Rises from Pluto's 'Heart' (Photo)
by Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer   |   July 21, 2015 05:48pm ET

A second mountain range on Pluto that rises from the dwarf planet's heart-shaped region, nicknamed Tombaugh Regio, is seen in this stunning image from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. NASA unveiled the image on July 21, 2015.
Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI View full size image
Pluto has a big heart — big enough to accommodate at least two sets of mountains, a new photo from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft reveals.
New Horizons has spotted a second mountain range inside Tombaugh Regio, the 1,200-mile-wide (2,000 kilometers) heart-shaped feature that mission team members named after Pluto's discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh.
This newfound range rises up to 1 mile (1.6 km) above Pluto's frigid surface, making it comparable in height to the Appalachian Mountains of the eastern United States, NASA officials said. Tombaugh Regio's other known mountain range, by contrast, is more similar to the tall and jagged Rocky Mountains, topping out at more than 2 miles (3.2 km) in elevation. [New Horizons' Pluto Flyby: Complete Coverage]
The newly discovered range lies just west of the ice plains known as Sputnik Planum and is 68 miles (110 km) northwest of the taller mountain range, which mission scientists are calling Norgay Montes after Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, who along with Edmund Hillary completed the first-ever ascent of Mt. Everest, in 1953. (Tombaugh Regio, Norgay Montes and other such names remain informal monikers until they're officially approved by the International Astronomical Union.)
The new photo, which New Horizons captured during its historic Pluto flyby on July 14, shows a startling complexity of terrain within Tombaugh Regio, researchers said.
"There is a pronounced difference in texture between the younger, frozen plains to the east and the dark, heavily cratered terrain to the west," Jeff Moore, leader of New Horizons' geology, geophysics and imaging team, said in a statement today (July 21) upon the photo's release.
"There's a complex interaction going on between the bright and the dark materials that we're still trying to understand," added Moore, who's based at at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.
The lack of craters on Sputnik Planum suggests the icy plains are extremely young in geological terms — 100 million years or less, mission team members have said. But the darker terrain to the west is probably several billion years old.
Features as small as 0.5 miles (0.8 km) wide are visible in the new photo, which New Horizons took from a distance of 48,000 miles (77,000 km). But the spacecraft zoomed to within just 7,800 miles (12,500 km) of Pluto's surface on July 14, so even more spectacular images of the dwarf planet should be coming down to Earth in the future.
All of New Horizons' close-approach data should be in researchers' hands in compressed form by the end of 2015, while it may take another year to get the complete flyby dataset down to Earth, team members have said.

New Photos of Pluto Moons Nix and Hydra Show Best Views Yet
by Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer   |   July 21, 2015 02:24pm ET

Two of Pluto's small satellites are getting their moment in the sun.
Newly released photos captured by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft during its historic Pluto flyby on July 14 reveal intriguing new details about Nix and Hydra, two of the dwarf planet's five satellites. For example, Nix is shaped like a jelly bean and bears a curious red patch, while Hydra resembles a big, gray mitten.
The reddish region on Nix also appears to have a bull's-eye pattern, suggesting that it's an impact crater, researchers said. [New Horizons' Pluto Flyby: Complete Coverage]
"Additional compositional data has already been taken of Nix but is not yet downlinked. It will tell us why this region is redder than its surroundings," New Horizons mission scientist Carly Howett, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement today (July 21).
"This observation is so tantalizing, I'm finding it hard to be patient for more Nix data to be downlinked," she added.
New Horizons snapped the Nix photo from a distance of about 102,000 miles (165,000 kilometers). The image reveals that the satellite is about 26 miles long by 22 miles wide (42 by 36 km), researchers said.
NASA's New Horizons probe captured these images of the Pluto moons Nix (left) and Hydra (right) on July 14, 2015. The Nix photo was taken from a distance of 102,000 miles (165,000 kilometers), while the Hydra image was snapped from 143,000 miles (231,000 km) away.
Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI
View full size image
Hydra is a bit bigger, at 34 miles long by 25 miles wide (55 by 40 km), according to the newly released photo, which New Horizons took when the probe was about 143,000 miles (231,000 km) from the mitten-shaped moon.
The Hydra image shows two apparent craters, and suggests that the upper and lower portions of the moon may be made of different stuff, at least on the surface. (In the photo, the upper part of Hydra looks darker than lower regions.)
"Before last week, Hydra was just a faint point of light, so it's a surreal experience to see it become an actual place, as we see its shape, and spot recognizable features on its surface for the first time," mission science collaborator Ted Stryk, of Roane State Community College in Tennessee, said in the same statement.
Pluto's other known moons are Charon, Kerberos and Styx. At 750 miles (1,207 km) in diameter, Charon is more than half as wide as Pluto itself, leading many researchers to regard Pluto-Charon as a binary system. Kerberos and Styx are even smaller than Nix and Hydra.
By mid-October, New Horizons will likely beam home images it took of Kerberos and Styx during the July 14 close encounter, NASA officials said.
It has taken a long time for scientists to take the measure of the Pluto system, which lies about 39 times farther from the sun than Earth does on average. The dwarf planet itself was discovered in 1930, and Charon wasn't spotted until 1978. Nix, Hydra, Kerberos and Styx were all detected by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope between 2005 and 2012.
Researchers, and the rest of humanity, finally got their first up-close look at these far-flung bodies when New Horizons zoomed through the Pluto system on July 14, coming within 7,800 miles (12,500 km) of the dwarf planet's surface.

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