Pluto has ridges on its icy surface, NASA revealed – El Pais – Cali Colombia

Approach Pluto’s surface showing a young chain of mountains 3,500 meters high
. Photo: Nasa

Pluto has ridges on its icy surface. It is one of the first revelations of high definition photographs sent from Wednesday NASA probe New Horizons, after its historic passage through the icy planet.

The mountains will have an elevation of 3400 meters, the US space agency explained. This is almost the same altitude in the Bolivian city of La Paz.

Nine and a half years it took him to a NASA probe approaching the planet away from the solar system. These are the largest captured images of Pluto and its moon
. Photos: NASA

The scientists also were amazed to see a region near Pluto that shows no sign of being hit by meteors, despite the dwarf planet lies in the chaotic Kuiper Belt, a region beyond Neptune filled with cosmic debris that constantly plague Pluto and its five moons.

NASA also reported that the findings made by New Horizons show that Pluto is geologically active and containing areas –in astronomical terms – they are quite young: perhaps less than 100 million years.

Also read: Travel historical !, probe New Horizons reaches its closest approach to Pluto

This is just a fraction of the age of the Solar System, was born 4,500 million years ago. “could be active at this time,” said John Spencer, one of the project scientists.

The first time scientists saw a geologically active phenomenon was Triton, a moon of Neptune examined by Voyager 2 in the 80s and virtually no He had meteorite impacts.

“Now that we have established that these small planets may be very active after a long time, I think many geophysical start from scratch to try to understand how exactly is this possible,” he said the mission’s principal investigator Alan Stern.

Also read: c erebro behind the historic voyage to Pluto, also has a “mission” in Cali

“The bedrock that forms these mountains have to be made of H2O, water-ice,” Stern said. There are many other types of ice on the surface of Pluto, but are formed from nitrogen, methane and carbon monoxide.

Y “can not make mountains from that. It would be too soft,” said Spencer told reporters.

historical Overflight

The unmanned probe New Horizons, 700 million and the size of a piano, spent most of Tuesday taking photos and collecting data from Pluto, when it passed just 12,430 km from its surface.

These images, including color data of the dwarf planet and some of its five moons, have ten times more detail than had been achieved so far.

But the information collected the ship is just beginning to reach Earth, after a voyage of nine years and 5,000 million kilometers. And the data will drip over the next 16 months, according to Stern.

The probe, which was configured to perform data collection, could not communicate at the same time with the technical on Earth. However, he interrupted his task to send 15 minutes of telemetry data. It took four hours to allow the data sent from the solar system came to NASA.

Other images revealed on Wednesday they showed that Charon, Pluto’s largest moon, has its own belt of valleys and mountains stretching along 960 km above the surface.

“Charon made us hallucinate when we got the picture today,” he said project scientist attached, Cathy Olkin.

“It’s a small world full of deep canyons, depressions, cliffs and dark areas are still a bit of a mystery to us,” said Olkin.

From the Voyager 2 mission NASA, which touched Neptune in 1989, no other ship had visited a planetary system. And Pluto, which was considered by far the most distant planet from the sun until it was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006, has never been explored.

Previously photos taken from the probe had revealed that the dwarf planet has a surface full of curiosities: from a dark picture whale-shaped to a bright clear silhouette that looks like a heart.

But what else are these forms, or what type of terrain they represent, is still a mystery. The images published on Wednesday, have a resolution of about 100 meters per pixel.

According to John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for the science mission of NASA, details on Pluto has captured public attention because it reveals news about the origin of the Earth and raises questions seniors, such as extraterrestrial life if possible