New images reveal 'emerging puzzle' on the faces of Pluto
Meteorologist/Science Writer
Tuesday, June 16, 2015, 4:57 AM - Now less than 30 days before NASA's New Horizons makes a historic flyby of Pluto, the latest images from the spacecraft are revealing an "emerging puzzle" of light and dark terrain on the faces of this dwarf planet.
New Horizons, the very first spacecraft to visit the Pluto system, will by making its much-anticipated flyby on July 14, 2015, and as the date draws nearer, images of the dwarf planet and its moons continue to amaze.
Below, taken between May 29 and June 2, are four new images returned by New Horizon's LORRI instrument, showing four "faces" of Pluto.
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
According to the New Horizons page at the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory:
From left to right, the images were taken when Pluto's central longitude was 17, 63, 130, and 243 degrees, respectively. The date of each image, the distance of the New Horizons spacecraft from Pluto, and the number of days until Pluto closest approach are all indicated in the figure. These images show dramatic variations in Pluto's surface features as it rotates. When a very large, dark region near Pluto’s equator appears near the limb, it gives Pluto a distinctly, but false, non-spherical appearance. Pluto is known to be almost perfectly spherical from previous data.
"Even though the latest images were made from more than 30 million miles away (50 million kilometres), they show an increasingly complex surface with clear evidence of discrete equatorial bright and dark regions - some that may also have variations in brightness," Alan Stern, New Horizons Principal Investigator the Southwest Research Institute, in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement. "We can also see that every face of Pluto is different and that Pluto's northern hemisphere displays substantial dark terrains, though both Pluto's darkest and its brightest known terrain units are just south of, or on, its equator. Why this is so is an emerging puzzle."
"We've seen evidence of light and dark spots in Hubble Space Telescope images and in previous New Horizons pictures, but these new images indicate an increasingly complex and nuanced surface," Stern added. "Now, we want to start to learn more about what these various surface units might be and what's causing them. By early July we will have spectroscopic data to help pinpoint that."
More recent images of Pluto are available, up to June 13 as this article is published, which are available on the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory website. The images shown above are older due to the processing they were put through to sharpen them and bring out the details - a process known as deconvolution. While this method does produce results which are much more detailed than the originals, it can also introduce "artifacts" that could be mistaken for real terrain features. As such, the science team will be analyzing the images as the spacecraft closes the distance to Pluto, to determine exactly which of these features are real.
Source: JLU-APL | NASA
WATCH BELOW: This video, produced by NASA a year before New Horizons' arrival at the Pluto system, reveals the mission, and what the team hopes to get from this historic rendezvous.
