New Horizons: Near Encounter Phase Options

[machi]

Little collage about what I see in the newest picture from Pluto.
So many different kind of terrains in the one image!

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[Daniele_bianchin...]

We were presented this map yesterday:

[attachment=36955:Namnekart.jpg]

Wow i love cthulhu regio name, or Cetus regio ;-)

[Gladstoner]

(Never mind.)

[Bjorn Jonsson]

I can't remember when was the last time I was as surprised (or even confused) as I am now after watching a press conference announcing new planetary spacecraft results.

My strongest 'reaction' to these results is this one: It is now clear that Pluto, Charon and Triton are all either currently active or have been active relatively recently. So now I wonder, are big Kuiper belt objects generally active? And I also wonder about possible implications for the satellites of Uranus - they might suddenly have gotten a whole lot more interesting today than they were yesterday.

My first reaction when I saw the close-up image of Pluto was "this is the surface of a comet or an asteroid". My bet is that at least some depressions in that image, like the big central one, are sublimation pits.

On Twitter someone mentioned resemblance to 67P.

Hi, long time lurker here. Sorry to break my silence but I had a question: Isn't anyone reminded of Titania when seeing Charon?

If I remember correctly I mentioned that Charon reminded me of Titania and Ariel when the chasm was first seen in the Charon images 1-3 days ago.

[matlac]

A weak attempt at getting the false colorization onto the latest closeup.

[attachment=36950:2015_7_1...oseup_an.png]

Disclosure: this is nothing remotely close to accurate - lots of fudgework here.

I did notice something quite interesting near the top left though. Looks like dunes.

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Prefer a rotated version actually.

(click to enlarge)

Mesmerizing! Another great day to be alive. NH team during the broadcast were like a bunch of kids in a candy store. Charon is a total surprise and on par with Pluto as a crowd pleaser. We only have seen a glimpse of those two celestial bodies and we can already list a page full of different geological features... I hope Charonshine won't let us down.

Since this photo was unveiled, I can't help myself to see the isolated mountains in the reddish "plains" as if they were "flooded" by the red material in some way (deposit, eolian sedimentation, name it). Your tentative colorization makes it even more visible. I agree with you about the the small ondulating features that looks like dunes. It will be really interesting when spectroscopy data, topography and other measures will be put together.

About Charon's pole: I can't help but see a circular feature under the irregular dark matter. Probably an illusion as I see what I want to see. Can't wait until next press conference for more information.

Matt

[Marz]

How confident are we about the cratering rate in the region of Pluto's orbit? Could the apparent youth of the mountains be due to an overestimate of impactors out there?

I'm just speculating here, but perhaps the "mountains" are the tips of massive icebergs. I wonder if warm, buoyant chunks of "mantle ice" might break free and could slowly convect through less "crustal ice"? It is really confusing to think how young this surface might be; I wonder if cratering rates might need revision for the outer solar system?

[belleraphon1]

A major seismic event happened across the entire globe of the Earth today.

"This event is what we would expect to see if millions of swear jars suddenly burst, all across the civilized world," a noted seismologist stated.

-the other Doug

Agreed. My AWE runneth over

Craig

[nprev]

Just finished the press conference. The biggest surprise by far seems to be that tidal heating is now quite obviously not the only possible means of internal heating for icy worlds.

There were hints of this from Enceladus, but I think that the general consensus was that it had to be tidal heating somehow. A paradigm falls.

Challenging assumptions to find the truth: That's the essence of science itself.

[hendric]

This is the only thing that even resembles a crater I can find in the whole image. There are some other vaguely roundish areas, but I can't convince myself they aren't depressions created some other way. This one has the illumination on the correct side, and a butterfly-looking ejecta blanket typical of a low inclination impact.

[ZLD]

Honestly, not knowing what to expect a crater to look like on Pluto, that still looks more like an inactive vent, than an impact crater to me. Very interesting to see such crater free surface. There's only a few in the Solar System after all!

So, NH2 anybody?

[fredk]

It looks like the dark smudge that xflare and I are interested in really leaps out in the more sunlit, full-Pluto image from yesterday, even as the sun angle washes out the shadowed ripples...

On one level, that's obvious. It's not a shadow, so it doesn't depend on sun angle. But it may be a clue about what to look for elsewhere, if you're inclined to hunt for more potential vents—er, odd smudges.

Yeah. Comparing with the full-disc shot you can identify other albedo-dark "smudges", circled in black here:

I've also circled in grey part of what appears in the full-disc shot as a mid-tone region.

The bits of the dark Cthulhu region we can see look tantalizing...

[Gladstoner]

Perhaps, on a small scale, craters have a hard time maintaining their form in the highly volatile ices. Some may yet show up on the mountains and 'carpet folds', which I heard may be water ice.

[paraisosdelsiste...]

I just wanted to say congratulations and thanks to the New Horizons team. I never thought that Pluto could be so young, with so little cratering with the implications it has.

Also, I have moved the New Horizons image database to an external server and modified the code for a better working. It can be reached through: http://www.ungeologoenapuros.es/newhorizonsdb/

[Nafnlaus]

The more I watch images of nitrogen freezing and thawing, the more I think it has to be responsible for the erosion. Seriously, check out this video starting about 1 minute in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7K-6zEhtYw

Now imagine that rather than a cupful of nitrogen undergoing these sorts of phase changes the amount is on the order of megatonnes per square kilometer.

[Julius]

Perhaps, on a small scale, craters have a hard time maintaining their form in the highly volatile ices. Some may yet show up on the mountains and 'carpet folds', which I heard may be water ice.

That could be a good argument. However what needs to be considered here IMHO is that it's the first time we're seeing an icy planet NOT orbiting a giant planet as was mentioned in the briefing. I would think that it should influence the cratering rate, it being lower for pluto compared to say the Saturn moons where the giant planet serves as a gravity hole theoretically leading to higher rate of impacts.