NASA researchers have made yet another a startling discovery about the geology of Pluto, as a newly-released image captured by the New Horizons spacecraft has lead to the discovery of wide frozen canyons located near the dwarf planet’s north polar region.
The enhanced color image, publicly unveiled by the US space agency Thursday in a statement, shows long canyons that run vertically along a portion of the region informally known as Lowell Regio. The widest of these canyons is roughly 45 miles (75 kilometers) wide and is located close to Pluto’s north pole, and is shaded yellow in one of the newly-released pictures.
Running roughly parallel to that canyon are two others, one to the east and one to the west, that are colored green in the photograph. Each of these geological features are approximately 6 miles (10 km) wide. Furthermore, NASA scientists note that the degraded walls of these canyons seem to indicate that they are far older than those found elsewhere on the dwarf planet’s surface.
Credit: NASA
The polar canyons also contain what appears to be evidence that Pluto was once home to tectonic activity, and the largest canyon was also found to contain a shallow, winding valley (indicated by the blue highlights on the image) that runs the entire length of its floor. Another valley (pink) can be found towards the bottom-right of the photograph, the researchers noted.
Photo also reveals a previously-undiscovered high-elevation area
Nearby terrain located to the bottom right of the canyons appears to have been covered by some type of substance that obscures some of the landscape’s smaller topographic features, and several 45 mile wide, irregularly shaped pits (red in color) stretch 2.5 miles across the region.
According to the agency, these pits could be areas where subsurface ice melted or sublimated from below, causing the ground to collapse and scar the terrain. Furthermore, the area’s color and composition are said to be unusual, as it contains areas of higher elevation (which show up yellow in the enhanced-color image) that have not been seen previously on Pluto.
The yellow-colored terrain gives way to a bluish-gray at lower elevations and latitudes, and the infrared instruments on New Horizons found abundant methane ice throughout Lowell Regio but little to no nitrogen ice. Will Grundy, head of the New Horizons composition team from Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, said that the yellow terrain “may correspond to older methane deposits that have been more processed by solar radiation than the bluer terrain.”
The image that served as the basis for these new observations was captured using New Horizons’ Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) instrument. It was taken in a resolution of about 2,230 feet (680 meters) per pixel from a distance of 21,100 miles (33,900 km) from Pluto’s surface on July 14, 2015 – less than an hour before the spacecraft’s closest approach to the dwarf planet.
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Image credit: NASA
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