NASA made about 100 discoveries on Pluto in three months

The mission of New Horizons has been extremely fruitful. The spacecraft flew past Pluto in July 2015 and continues to transmit data to Earth. Over the past three months, scientists have revised what they knew about this dwarf planet and its five satellites.

Alan Stern, a leading NASA researcher, and colleagues published an article in the journal Science on Pluto 's System: The First Results of the New Horizons Study , which summarizes the first months of research and also publishes some new discoveries that were not previously reported.
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In total, the article lists about a hundred discoveries made by NASA in three months.

Before the device "New Horizons" flew to Pluto, the scientists supposed to find a dead cold stone with a lot of craters. Instead, they found something amazing. Stunningly beautiful, strange and geologically active world, the surface of which resembles the wrinkled skin of a dragon, with huge ice mountains and other geological objects.



“This is unexpected: it was assumed that Pluto, due to its small size, lost all heat and turned into an icy world without significant geological activity,” said Hilke Schlichting, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, co-author of the scientific article. “If we can understand the origin of geological activity on Pluto, it can also help explain the geological activity on some of the icy satellites of Saturn and Jupiter.”

Pluto is not a satellite of a giant planet that could warm it with its gravity. He is alone in space and somehow maintains geological activity on his own. Scientists have yet to explain this mechanism.

One of the most interesting areas on Pluto is the Sputnik Planum plain, covered with nitrogen ice, with signs of flowing ice (to all appearances, glaciers come down from the mountains). The plain of Sputnik Planum is devoid of craters, that is, this new formation in the geological sense.



Scientists have some ideas that may cause geological activity on Pluto. One of the assumptions - that under the surface of the planet is the ocean.

The New Horizons spacecraft continues its journey through the Kuiper belt, continuously transmitting information to Earth. The New Horizons mission continues to work, keeping in touch with the device and processing new information. In the near future, the apparatus will be directed toward another object in this part of outer space.