Pluto Predictions, What will NH find? |
Pluto Predictions, What will NH find? |
Oct 3 2008, 04:50 PM
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Senior Member Group: Moderator Posts: 2785 Joined: 10-November 06 From: Pasadena, CA Member No.: 1345 |
Dunes.
And basins. Maybe not as thoroughly chemically processed as Titan's basins, but basins. What do you think New Horizons will find at Pluto? How will Pluto surprise us? -Mike -------------------- Some higher resolution images available at my photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/31678681@N07/
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Oct 5 2008, 01:33 AM
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Senior Member Group: Moderator Posts: 3233 Joined: 11-February 04 From: Tucson, AZ Member No.: 23 |
Okay, I'll bite.
Charon will look a lot like Dione. Mostly cold and dead with a few large impact basins. Extensive tectonic fractures will be visible on the sub-Plutonian hemisphere, but billions of years have passed since those fractures were last active. Pluto will look quite similar, but the effects of a thin atmosphere will increase the rate of erosion, smoothing out a number of older impact basins. New Horizons will spot a number of flow-like features, leading to a huge debate over whether those features were carved by ancient cryovolcanism or from nitrogen/methane flows from a time when the atmosphere may have been thicker. -------------------- &@^^!% Jim! I'm a geologist, not a physicist!
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