Latest Pluto Flyby Photos 2015-07-17 NASA New Horizons News Conference / Mission Update
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more at: http://scitech.quickfound.net/astro/planet_news.html July 17th post Pluto flyby live press conference on the New Horizons mission. "NASA officials and team members of the historic New Horizons mission to Pluto provide an update and share the latest developments on the spacecraft during a news conference from NASA headquarters." Public domain film from NASA. http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-new-horizons-discovers-frozen-plains-in-the-heart-of-pluto-s-heart In the latest data from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, a new close-up image of Pluto reveals a vast, craterless plain that appears to be no more than 100 million years old, and is possibly still being shaped by geologic processes. This frozen region is north of Pluto’s icy mountains, in the center-left of the heart feature, informally named “Tombaugh Regio” (Tombaugh Region) after Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930. “This terrain is not easy to explain,” said Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team (GGI) at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. “The discovery of vast, craterless, very young plains on Pluto exceeds all pre-flyby expectations.” This fascinating icy plains region -- resembling frozen mud cracks on Earth -- has been informally named “Sputnik Planum” (Sputnik Plain) after the Earth’s first artificial satellite. It has a broken surface of irregularly-shaped segments, roughly 12 miles (20 kilometers) across, bordered by what appear to be shallow troughs. Some of these troughs have darker material within them, while others are traced by clumps of hills that appear to rise above the surrounding terrain. Elsewhere, the surface appears to be etched by fields of small pits that may have formed by a process called sublimation, in which ice turns directly from solid to gas, just as dry ice does on Earth. Scientists have two working theories as to how these segments were formed. The irregular shapes may be the result of the contraction of surface materials, similar to what happens when mud dries. Alternatively, they may be a product of convection, similar to wax rising in a lava lamp. On Pluto, convection would occur within a surface layer of frozen carbon monoxide, methane and nitrogen, driven by the scant warmth of Pluto’s interior. Pluto’s icy plains also display dark streaks that are a few miles long. These streaks appear to be aligned in the same direction and may have been produced by winds blowing across the frozen surface. The Tuesday “heart of the heart” image was taken when New Horizons was 48,000 miles (77,000 kilometers) from Pluto, and shows features as small as one-half mile (1 kilometer) across. Mission scientists will learn more about these mysterious terrains from higher-resolution and stereo images that New Horizons will pull from its digital recorders and send back to Earth during the next year. The New Horizons Atmospheres team observed Pluto’s atmosphere as far as 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) above the surface, demonstrating that Pluto’s nitrogen-rich atmosphere is quite extended. This is the first observation of Pluto’s atmosphere at altitudes higher than 170 miles above the surface (270 kilometers). The New Horizons Particles and Plasma team has discovered a region of cold, dense ionized gas tens of thousands of miles beyond Pluto -- the planet’s atmosphere being stripped away by the solar wind and lost to space. “This is just a first tantalizing look at Pluto’s plasma environment,” said New Horizons co-investigator Fran Bagenal, University of Colorado, Boulder. "With the flyby in the rearview mirror, a decade-long journey to Pluto is over --but, the science payoff is only beginning,” said Jim Green, director of Planetary Science at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Data from New Horizons will continue to fuel discovery for years to come.” Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado, added, “We’ve only scratched the surface of our Pluto exploration, but it already seems clear to me that in the initial reconnaissance of the solar system, the best was saved for last." New Horizons is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, managed by the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, designed, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. SwRI leads the mission, science team, payload operations and encounter science planning.
Comments
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18:57 Lovely Nadia Drake (yes, Franks daughter).
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I downloaded this Thanks a lot
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Messengers travel
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Pluto seems to be the soler system's largest comet
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My gosh the guy on the right says uh and um a lot.
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Of course Pluto is a planet, a part of the family of planets both seen and unseen. Pluto is a pet planet, a proxy for all the other stray dwarfs in distant and unique orbits. Not a planet? It would be like saying our dog is not a part of our family just because she doesn't walk like we do or pay taxes or because she's small. Any evening we can look up and know that Pluto is out there somewhere patrolling the outer limits even though we can’t see him any more than we can see Uranus or Neptune or the dark side of the moon. Not a planet? You might as well say Australia is not a continent. Pluto is the exclamation point at the end of the thought we use to describe who we are—the unknown, the unseen, the overlooked. Pluto completes our solar system. Pluto is a planet because we say he is. He’s our pet.
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so awesome
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So irritating every time I hear a measurement in Imperial units. When will the US leave the dark ages behind for good?
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I think we've all seen the cratered surface around Uranus too buddy... so just back off!
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it's all pixelated garbage
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how can pluto still have an atmosphere if it looses that much gas every summer?
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people cant find money for water where water missing , but they found money to looking for water on the planets
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ten years and all that money for 'yawn, ho hum' outcome - nasa needs a reboot, or a boot period, bad ...
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what aspect would you have on a power source consisting of a 1000 foot wide aluminium plated kevlar disk slowly spinning and bowed into a catenary by a "cathode ray electronically charged" magnet suspended by uhf standing waves with the catenary focused on a standard photo-voltaic solar panel?
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looks like the pattern you see when you pour cream in coffee. or paint thinner in aluminium paint . i'm wondering if it could be from turbulence in the deep thick atmosphere causing the low energy lower atmosphere being churned up into the upper atmosphere where it expands cools and absorbs heat. then is churned back to the surface and releases it's heat in that pattern when iots compressed to the max at the surface of the planet. p. s. i think this probe is amazing
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good views of our NINTH PLANET!!!
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Good conference
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thanks Obama!
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okay so I kind of lost the ability to pay attention to the rest of the video after I saw Brian May. I'm still wrestling with that one..the rest is easy lol.
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