New Horizons: Near Encounter Phase Options

[climber]

Yes, Herobrine, I can spend hours staring at your stitch. All those "bubbles" and convections remind me now of Jupiter atmosphere.

[Exploitcorporati...]

Cropped and stretched from Herobrine's mosaic:



Dan Delany spoke of perceiving transparency in the ice in post #1027. Looking at this multitude of dark fuzzy dots and smudges, it's very easy to imagine the broken and sunken wreckage of Cthulhu and environs peeking through a frozen sea.

[wildespace]

My mosaic, assembled in Microsoft ICE (with one frame added and blended manually, as the software couldn't register it), auto-levelled and rotated so that north is approximately up:



Medium rez: http://s12.postimg.org/mv0o1jj59/lor_02991...3_stitchwow.jpg
Full rez: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wildespace/19803197558

Makes me wanna ride a snowbike or deer sledge across those plains.

[nprev]

Stepped away for a bit in anticipation of the UMSF imagewizards doing what you all do best...never a disappointment!!! Thank you.

What an astonishingly strange landscape. Hard for me to see any analogues with Triton at all now in terms of landforms. Few if any familiar processes immediately evident aside from cratering given that the behavior of N2 glaciers at 0.06g is probably gonna differ in subtle ways from water ice glaciers on Earth.

Been a pretty good 4-5% of total data thus far.

[Sherbert]

Dan Delany spoke of perceiving transparency in the ice in post #1027. Looking at this multitude of dark fuzzy dots and smudges, it's very easy to imagine the broken and sunken wreckage of Cthulhu and environs peeking through a frozen sea.

On the larger scale mosaic image it is possible to define quite well the topology of the surface beneath the ice. There are similarly shaped formations all over Pluto as Dvandorn pointed out, recording a long history of impacts with other icy KBOs and the round craters that record secondary impacts and the fallout from the process that formed the binary system. Most interestingly the same Tombaugh shaped formation is visible in the image of Charon, only its not filled with a huge mound of ice. There is a brilliant example at Pluto's North Pole. Tombaugh without the ice. Its all flowed out of the basin onto the plains. Right next to it is a far older and more eroded example running in the opposite direction away from this viewpoint. These "ice cream cone" shaped formations of all sizes, ages and orientations are visible across the surface of Pluto.

MOD NOTE/EDIT: The mechanism by which the Plutonian satellite system formed has not been positively determined; please don't state what is at this time merely one hypothesis as a fact.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/124013840@N06...eposted-public/

EDIT:- Indeed! "possible fallout".
Here is an unannotated version of the above.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/124013840@N06...eposted-public/

[TSC]

(Beautiful images, thank you all!)

The following is speculation from a newbie...

I have been trying to create a mental image of a temperature map superimposed on the images of Tombaugh Regio, and trying to imagine how the temperature changes with time in this region, as Pluto's year progresses. It seems to me that the upper part of the heart is more fluid than the lower part which is more frozen, which seems natural given that, as I understand it, it has been receiving more sunlight on average (it's closer to the center of the iluminated hemisphere). Making an analogy with the Earth and thinking that the exterior of the heart is "land" and that the heart is "ocean" (viscuous/solid/freezing), and supposing that the heat capacity is different ("land" heats/cools more than "ocean"), it could help explaining that the little peaks that appear in the heart ("islands") would be hotter and that cell boundaries would tend to be located there, freezing later than the central parts of the cells. I am assuming that boundaries are locally warmer, freezing later. It would then seem natural that boundaries seem to irradiate from these peaks/islands, tending to join other islands. In this view, darker cells would tend to be shallower/warmer regions (where "ocean" would be closer to hotter "land" - but note that there are other factors too, such as proximity to the regions receiving more sunlight, etc) and white cells would be more frozen. In that case, if Pluto is approaching a sort of "Winter", the upper part of the heart would also freeze and become whiter as time passes.

The small islands in the heart, and also mountains close to the "ocean" seem to be eroded, possibly because the ocean ciclically expands and contracts, raising and lowering its average level, causing friction in the islands (which also creates heat, contributing to a slightly higher temperature near the islands/shore/cell boundaries).

(of course, this is a huge simplification... another look near the upper shore of the heart made me wonder at all the slow movement that may be occuring along the submerged valleys/hills... there should be more movement in regions far from from the static shore, so it's much more complicated...)

[Sherbert]

Your ideas describe the surface influences very nicely. The proposed curtains of darker Talus at the base of mountains, would absorb more energy and be "warmer" than the surrounding ice hills. Patches of older surface showing through the ice would tend to expand and exert pressure on the icy polygons, possibly creating their convex profiles. Under the ice influences seem to play a significant role too. Trapped gases under the ice, as discussed in the briefing.

[Habukaz]

A breached crater wall in an area that looks like it has experienced, or is, some sort of flow (i.e. notice the flat and smooth terrain):



A crater that looks like it has a valley entering into it:



An analogy to Martian river valleys?

[scalbers]

Here's my take on the seven available frames of the LORRI mosiac of Charon (rimshot):

I recall saying to someone earlier that the science teams would have some regrets about not seeing the intriguing Charon-facing hemisphere, but it seems now that they couldn't have planned this better.

Nice to see you on the forum again Exploit, and thanks for posting this mosaic. Lots to explore in this for a while. Perhaps this was planned to aim the flyby to see the Heart closeup, based on the HST and Eclipse data from the past decades?

Here is a 4K map version that I can now post.



This has the new 2x2 mosaic included that approaches being sufficient for a map at this resolution. I also included some additional approach images, and improved the navigation and colorizing.

[Habukaz]

Perhaps this was planned to aim the flyby to see the Heart closeup, based on the HST and Eclipse data from the past decades

Yes, as was brought up earlier, this part of Pluto was known to have a unique carbon monoxide signature (2005) and was therefore specifically selected for closer investigation.

[scalbers]

Thanks for the reminder. It's interesting that the albedo variations of the Heart also show up in the HST/Eclipse maps.

[Bill Harris]

On the

MOD

Ultreya!

By all means...

Ultreya! Ultreya!

[wildespace]

An attempt to colourise the my mosaic with Ralph data (from the global high-rez image link)



I couldn't align all the features, but I think the result is decent.

~~~

I am wondering, which Ralph image was used for this colour data, and can we access it anywhere? I have a suspicion that the Ralph image that is being used is low-rez, and thus gives a more uniform colouration, lacking in smaller details. The global views we've seen so far are almost monochrome.

[FOV]

Great stuff people.

I just want to make a small observation that the large craters in the dark "Cthulu" region, which is surmised to be billions of years old, don't look that eroded to me. You can still see central peaks in some of them, and the rims look crisp. Of course some processes on earth are different, however for comparison, Manicouagan crater is only 200 million years old, and has been run over by glaciers, probably several times. OTOH, the craters inside of Tombaugh regio look battered and flattened, somewhat similar to Manicouagan . So, like earth, Pluto's glaciers are a regional, local and not global phenomenon?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manicouagan_crater

[Bill Harris]

I'm starting work on a Poster Session on the Geomorphology of Pluto.

It's a work-in-progress, but here is the initial Index image:
https://univ.smugmug.com/New-Horizons-Missi...ron/

--Bill