Houston
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Methane ice dunes have been detected on the surface of Pluto, by NASA
spacecraft. The structures offer a new insight into the dwarf planet and
with the differences in planetary structures within our solar system.
New Horizons NASA spacecraft
NASA
The data comes from NASA's New Horizons mission, which flew close to Pluto in July 2015. The data from this mission continues to be analysed. The space probe sped past Pluto at a rate of 58,536 kilometers per hour (36,373 miles per hour), collecting valuable data as moved further out into space. New Horizons New Horizons is an interplanetary space probe that was launched as a part of NASA's New Frontiers program. The main mission to perform a flyby study of the Pluto, followed by a secondary mission to fly close to and study other Kuiper belt objects. In doing so the craft became the fifth artificial object to leave the Solar System.
CLOSEUP: The dwarf planet Pluto as
photographed by the LORRI and Ralph instruments aboard the New Horizons
spacecraft on July 13.
NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI/Wikimedia Commons
Pluto (or '134340 Pluto') is a dwarf planet located in the Kuiper belt, which refs to the ring of bodies beyond Neptune. It was the first Kuiper belt object to be discovered, originally classified as a planet and then downgraded to dwarf planet status. Pluto is primarily made of ice and rock and is relatively small—about one-sixth the mass of the Moon. However, the object continues to fascinate scientists interested in the origins of the Solar System. New insights into Pluto The New Horizons data into Pluto relates to a plain in the surface called Sputnik Planitia. Earlier image shad suggested that parts of the plain are covered with fields of dunes. These are, as the new data reveals, dues of methane located close to a range of mountains composed of water ice, which stand 5 kilometers tall. The newly detected methane dunes a situated between 0.4 and 1 kilometer apart, where the surface temperatures are minus 230 degrees Celsius (minus 382 Fahrenheit). The dunes appear to be composed of and that they are made up of particles of methane ice, which are some 200-300 micrometers in diameter. In other words, the methane particles are around the size of grains of sand.
The Pluto system as we know it today.
Four small moons--Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra, orbit the central
"binary planet" comprising Pluto and its large, nearby moon Charon.
NASA/STScI/Showalter
According to Jani Radebaugh, a planetary scientist at Brigham Young University, speaking with The Guardian: “Pluto, even though it’s so far away from Earth and so very cold, has a riot of processes we never expected to see. It is far more interesting than any of us dreamed, and tells us that these very distant bodies are well worth visiting.” Researchers have compared Pluto's dunes to those in California's Death Valley and China's Taklamakan desert, albeit with a very different composition. While dunes have been detected elsewhere in solar system: on Mars, Venus, and Saturn's moon Titan, Pluto's are the only dunes to be found to be composed of methane.
Pluto By Moonlight: On July 14, New
Horizons mission scientists will soon obtain the first images of the
night region of Pluto, using only the light from Charon, itself softly
illuminated by a Sun 1,000 times dimmer than it is at Earth.
JHUAPL / SwRI
The findings have been published in the journal Science. The research paper succinctly is titled “Dunes on Pluto.”
