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THE APPALACIANS OF PLUTO NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is still beaming back data from last week's stunning flyby of Pluto. The latest discovery to reach Earth is a second range of icy mountains. The newfound peaks are one-half mile to one mile (1-1.5 kilometers) high, about the same height as the United States' Appalachian Mountains.  For comparison, another range of icy mountains reported last week are about twice as tall, akin to Earth's Rockies. The "Appalachians of Pluto" are located at the lower-left edge of Pluto's best known feature, a bright, heart-shaped region named Tombaugh Regio. They appear to divide a fresh, bright plain on the right from much older and darker terrain to the left. "There is a pronounced difference in texture between the younger, frozen plains to the east and the dark, heavily-cratered terrain to the west," says Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team, GGI, at NASA's Ames Research Center. "There's a complex interaction going on between the bright and the dark materials that we're still trying to understand." While the bright plains (Sputnik Planum is believed to be relatively young in geological terms, perhaps less than 100 million years old, the darker region probably dates back billions of years. Moore notes that the bright, sediment-like material appears to be filling in old craters (for example, the bright circular feature to the lower left of center). Clearly, a lot is happening on Pluto that researchers are only beginning to wrap their minds around. |
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Would be great if they could send a mini 'rocket drone' down to take a few samples and closer pics. Maybe next time if there is a next time. Hmm. Judgment Day will be interesting - and all paths lead there.
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I tend to think that they resemble huge crystals rather than mountains as we know them, however as we do not have any idea about what processes could have produced mountains on Pluto or what processes might have occured to shape them after their emergence then our frame of reference would be useless for interpreting the pictures. They could just as easily be debris from the original formation of the Solar System but the apparently relatively young age of the material making up Sputnik Planum is intriguing. The spectroscopice analysis of the planet's structure will be fascinating.
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