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Tagged: Pluto

One of the newest images captured by LORRI aboard the New Horizons Spacecraft (NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI) 1

Science / Space / Unexplained

Newest View of Pluto’s Enigmatic Terrains Puzzle NASA

New Horizons: Pluto in ‘Even-Higher Resolution’ This Week NASA just released numerous fresh images of Pluto like we’ve never seen before—and yet again—we at Dark Matter News are near-speechless! This evening we see strange-looking “snakeskin” mountains, pockmarked dunes made not-of sand, but ICE; we see a new spectral image set of peculiar methane collection points, as well as new dynamic photos revealing Pluto’s array of planetary surface tones. Join us as we investigate these images, one-by-one! 1.) “Snakeskin” Mountains of ‘Tartarus Dorsa’ Nobody’s quite sure what to call this area yet. Unofficially dubbed, “Tartarus Dorsa,” NASA reveals that Pluto’s odd surface terrain has an...

NASA captures stunning new images of Pluto. (NASA) 1

Science

NASA: Breathtaking New Images of Pluto Emerge

NASA: Breathtaking New Images of Pluto Emerge Today, NASA released fresh images of Pluto from the New Horizons mission depicting ice mountains, surface-level hazes and frozen nitrogen. “In addition to being visually stunning, these low-lying hazes hint at the weather changing from day to day on Pluto, just like it does here on Earth,” said Will Grundy, lead of the New Horizons Composition team from Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, Arizona. According to the press release, “this new image also provides evidence for a remarkably Earth-like ‘hydrological’ cycle on Pluto – but involving soft and exotic ices, including nitrogen, rather than water ice.”...

Mosaic of high-resolution images of Pluto, sent back from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft from Sept. 5 to 7, 2015. The image is dominated by the informally-named icy plain Sputnik Planum, the smooth, bright region across the center. This image also features a tremendous variety of other landscapes surrounding Sputnik. The smallest visible features are 0.5 miles (0.8 kilometers) in size, and the mosaic covers a region roughly 1,000 miles (1600 kilometers) wide. The image was taken as New Horizons flew past Pluto on July 14, 2015, from a distance of 50,000 miles (80,000 kilometers). Credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute 0

Science / Space / Technology

NASA’s New Horizons Reveals Exciting New Pluto Images

New Features Spotted on Pluto Leave Researchers Puzzled NASA’s New Horizons team started a year-long download of images from the spacecraft over this past Labor Day weekend, returning to find incredible new details along the surface of the dwarf planet. These new images have left researchers quite puzzled about the planet’s mysterious topology. According to a press release, “Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we’ve seen in the solar system,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado. “If an artist had painted this Pluto before...