Members of the New Horizons mission summed up the interim results of the study of Pluto, naming the ten most important discoveries that the probe made during the flight past the dwarf planet, NASA reports.
“Our entire team is proud to be the first to study Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, something that many of us have been working on since the nineties. The data that New Horizons transmitted to Earth turned our understanding of planetology and the appearance of Pluto and its satellites, and inspired a new generation to study space. I will be forever indebted to our people and country for this,”said Alan Stern, Mission Leader.
Exactly a year ago, the New Horizons probe arrived in the Pluto system, flying only 12.5 thousand kilometers from the surface of the dwarf planet and receiving a lot of detailed photographs of its surface and its satellites. These images and data have forever turned our understanding of Pluto - it turned out to be an extremely complex and "living" world, whose surface is constantly renewing and changing, and not a lifeless ice on the edge of the solar system.
The New Horizons science team and NASA executives decided to celebrate this anniversary by selecting the 10 most significant discoveries made thanks to the instruments of the probe on Pluto and its moons.
The two main discoveries, according to scientists, were the complexity of Pluto and its moons and the processes that are now taking place on its surface. According to Stern, no one ever expected us to see traces of geological activity so far from the Sun.
In addition, scientists were surprised and pleased with other things - the discovery of the unusual behavior of Pluto's atmosphere, unexpectedly slowly evaporating into space, the discovery of traces of the subsurface ocean on Charon in the form of a "belt" of giant canyons at its equator, as well as proof of the common origin of all small Pluto moons.
The most notable discoveries were those amazing features of Pluto and Charon that can be seen with the naked eye - the giant "heart" of Pluto, the plains of Sputnik, the blood-red region of Mordor at the north pole of Charon, rivers of ice and other traces of geological and atmospheric activity on Pluto and bright blue is the color of its atmosphere.
And most of all, scientists were surprised that New Horizons failed to do it - the probe did not find any other satellite near Pluto, which came as a surprise to astronomers who believed that the resolution of Hubble and ground-based telescopes was not enough to detect other moons of the king of the underworld”, In addition to the five objects known to us.
Promotional video:
Now, according to NASA estimates, New Horizons has transmitted about 80% of the data collected during the passage through the Pluto system. The data transfer will be completed tentatively in October this year, which will free up memory for a new batch of scientific data that New Horizons will receive in January 2019, when it approaches the dwarf planet 2014 MU69.
As an added bonus, NASA has prepared a video with which anyone can feel like an astronaut landing on Pluto's surface.