New Horizons: Near Encounter Phase Options

[HammerD]

Great image of Charon and that section of terrain on Pluto! I must admit I was hoping for more releases. I guess more patience is required

[Tom Tamlyn]

Giant ice mountains! And everything else.

That was a really great press conference.

[Mercure]

"The whale" is now informally "Cthulu Regio"

More importantly, the team seems to have applied for the Heart to be officially called Tombaugh Regio. Alan Stern: (paraphrased) "It stood out like a beacon in the very first images we got down from Pluto, we were in no doubt that it should be named after the person who discovered Pluto".

[fredk]

Yikes!

Here's an extremely crude attempt to locate the hires frame on the full disc frame:

You can see that we're seeing just a fingertip (fintip?) of the whale/Cthulhu/dark region.

According to the plan, there should be more hires frames to come to the north and east, which should show the transition to dark and light/heart/Tombaugh...

[Explorer1]

That dark streak going diagonally to the lower right shadowed corner from the mountains; is that real or an artifact? Reminds me of the dark seams in some of the Mars panoramas, but this isn't stitched.
Edit: it's more visible in Fredk's mosaic, going vertically down the inset.

[neo56]

My take on the amazing LORRI picture of Pluto:

[MarkG]

Ouch, the bottom of my jaw has rug burns.

[Marvin]

So I've heard three possible sources of heat driving the geology (or a combination of them):

1. Radioisotopes
2. Liquid water still releasing heat from the original formation
3. Impact Event with Charon

Thanks Emily, and others, for this chart:



http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/space-...icy-bodies.html

Water appears to be almost everywhere!

[EDG]

Charon looks incredible. That is definitely stealing the show for me!

I wonder if there's any consensus on that dark polar area on Charon - it looks almost like the dark area is it's a huge, deep irregular topographic depression to me (though granted there's not much help from the illumination angle). Is anyone else seeing that? Could that be real or illusion?

[xflare]

This dark area does look a little like the dark plume regions on Triton. There are also lots of little dark chains in the smoother area too

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[stevelu]

I've seen little mention of one of the things that leaps out to me from the folded mountain region – the charcoal-y looking smudge near bottom center on the image.

Hugely speculative to say it's deposition from a vent, of course. But that's where my mind keeps going.

re Explorer1's comment about the dark streak: I took that to be what was being discussed at the press briefing when a questioner referred to "something that sortof looks like a fault" and member of the science team agreed, without elaboration, that it sortof looked like a fault.

edit: xflare you beat me to it! 8^)
Glad you followed up on your earlier comment

[EDG]

So I've heard three possible sources of heat driving the geology (or a combination of them):

1. Radioisotopes
2. Liquid water still releasing heat from the original formation
3. Impact Event with Charon

Or maybe the tidal locking happened more recently than we thought? What if Charon was only recently captured by Pluto (or formed in a big impact more recently than we'd assumed, as Emily asked)?
I'm not sure they really know enough to definitively say "right, clearly there's other processes happening that can keep an icy world active for 4.6 billion years so we don't need tidal heating for that" at this stage. Clearly such processes do exist, but they surely can't be that certain about whether they're enough to cause all of what we're seeing here. Usually our assumptions about something we've never seen before end up being disproved on further analysis.

[Julius]

Those ice mountains remind of Europa s surface up close although much higher at 11000 ft. I think Europa s topography did not surpass hundreds of meters?

[lars_J]

The chasms of Charon are VERY interesting.

Am I the only one that is seeing what appears to be a mountain formation that seems to stretch across the equatorial band? Perhaps all the way around?

[Habukaz]

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.