Pluto has ice mountains as tall as 11,000 ft, shown in pics taken by NASA’s New Horizons space probe
- 8 years ago
WASHINGTON — Scientists say Pluto has mountains made of water ice and is likely to have volcanoes and geysers, based on the data transmitted by the New Horizons spacecraft.
The New Horizons spacecraft sped past Pluto as close as 7,800 miles on Tuesday, the Guardian reported.
NASA released images of Pluto taken by the probe’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager telescopic camera from a distance as far as 476,000 miles from the surface, the Guardian reported.
“We have not found a single impact crater on this image. This means it must be a very young surface,” the BBC quoted mission scientist John Spencer as saying.
Data obtained by the probe are leading the scientists to believe that the dwarf planet has 11,000-ft mountains made of water ice and is likely to have volcanoes and geysers.
“What Kelsi and I predicted was that if we saw steep (water-ice) topography on Pluto with only a volatile veneer, there must be internal activity that's dredging nitrogen up through cryo-volcanism or geysers or some other process that's active into the present on this planet,” the BBC quoted Alan Stern, the mission’s chief scientist as saying.
It will take 16 months to send all of the data gathered by New Horizons back to Earth.
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The New Horizons spacecraft sped past Pluto as close as 7,800 miles on Tuesday, the Guardian reported.
NASA released images of Pluto taken by the probe’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager telescopic camera from a distance as far as 476,000 miles from the surface, the Guardian reported.
“We have not found a single impact crater on this image. This means it must be a very young surface,” the BBC quoted mission scientist John Spencer as saying.
Data obtained by the probe are leading the scientists to believe that the dwarf planet has 11,000-ft mountains made of water ice and is likely to have volcanoes and geysers.
“What Kelsi and I predicted was that if we saw steep (water-ice) topography on Pluto with only a volatile veneer, there must be internal activity that's dredging nitrogen up through cryo-volcanism or geysers or some other process that's active into the present on this planet,” the BBC quoted Alan Stern, the mission’s chief scientist as saying.
It will take 16 months to send all of the data gathered by New Horizons back to Earth.
-------------------------------------------------------------
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