On the heels of close-up images of the dwarf planet’s mountains and ice fields, NASA has released new pictures of the heart-shaped region of Pluto known as Tombaugh Regio, showing this prominent feature in greater detail than ever before.
According to Engadget, the latest pictures were taken by the New Horizons spacecraft when it made its closes approach to the surface in July. Using the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) instrument, it captured the images at a distance of 9,550 miles.
The pics represent the highest-resolution images ever obtained of a series of pits which scar the surface of Tombaugh Regio. Those pits seem to follow an intricate pattern and may have formed through a combination of evaporation and ice fracturing, NASA said.
The features are hundreds of yards across and several yards deep, and the rarity of impact craters in the area have led scientists to believe that they formed relatively recently. Due to the layout of the cracks, experts believe that they could provide new insights into the ice flow on Pluto as well as the exchange of nitrogen between the dwarf planet’s surface and atmosphere.
Mission set to continue with analysis of Kuiper Belt object
New Horizons used its LORRI telescopic camera to capture the images of the surface a mere 13 minutes before its closest approach, and it also managed to capture photographs of the southeast portion the dwarf planet’s ice sheet—a region known as Sputnik Planum—at the same time.
Launched on January 19, 2006, New Horizons was the first mission ever to be sent to the Pluto system and to the Kuiper Belt, the US space agency said. It completed a six-month long flyby of the dwarf planet and its moons this past summer, and is currently en route to a small Kuiper Belt object (KBO) known as 2014 MU69, where it will continue its mission.
“Even as the New Horizon’s spacecraft speeds away from Pluto out into the Kuiper Belt, and the data from the exciting encounter with this new world is being streamed back to Earth, we are looking outward to the next destination for this intrepid explorer,” John Grunsfeld, chief of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement back in August.
“There’s so much that we can learn from close-up spacecraft observations that we’ll never learn from Earth, as the Pluto flyby demonstrated so spectacularly,” added New Horizons science team member John Spencer from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Colorado. “The detailed images and other data that New Horizons could obtain from a KBO flyby will revolutionize our understanding of the Kuiper Belt and KBOs.”
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Feature Image: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
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