A spectacular sampling of imagery from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft reveals mountains and water ice bedrock on Pluto, an active crust on its largest moon Charon and the first resolved views of the icy world’s tiny mini-moons.
A snapshot of Pluto shows fresh deposits of water ice bedrock and 11,000-foot mountains, revealing evidence Pluto’s surface is one of the youngest in the solar system. Photo credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRINew Horizons found few craters on the surface of Pluto’s Texas-sized moon Charon, evidence of recent geologic activity. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRITuesday’s New Horizons flyby revealed Pluto’s tiny moon Hydra. The first resolved image of the object shows it to be 28 miles long and 19 miles in diameter, and better images are to come. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI
NASA’s New Horizons space probe, 10 days from a one-shot encounter with enigmatic Pluto, stopped collecting science data Saturday after a technical problem interrupted the spacecraft’s tightly-choreographed flight plan.
Watch as the New Horizons team hold a press conference an hour after they received confirmation that the spacecraft had successfully flown by Ultima Thule and had recorded the expected amount of science data.
New Horizons Mission Operations Manager (MOM) Alice Bowman describes how New Horizons will turn to Earth and ‘phone home’ to confirm if the flyby of Ultima Thule was a success.
