Pluto after its mountains, icy plains unveiled – TF1

New Horizons Pluto was beautiful fly Tuesday clichés that the probe sends to the Earth are slow to arrive. The NASA Friday unveiled new data and pictures of the planet and after discovering high mountains, the scientists were able to look at this time of huge frozen plains. The members of the mission remain fascinated by these new data received, which already provide answers to some questions … and open others.

Among the new data released Friday, NASA was interested in a large icy plain in “Tombaugh Region”, the name given to the vast area in the shape of heart. “This is not an easy area to decipher,” said Jeffrey Moore, one of the mission scientists. “So we did not see any fresh craters from impacts and the surface of this area is relatively recent, less than 100 million years. It is probably still being shaped by geological processes.” “The discovery of this vast plain young enough without impact craters on Pluto exceeds all our expectations,” he added.

The dwarf planet is located in the Kuiper Belt, a vast pile of debris beyond the orbit of Neptune, and is therefore normally bombarded with asteroids regularly. The scientist is thus expected to find very many impact craters on its surface, which does not seem to be the case in view of the first images received. The team of the New Horizons mission called this icy plain “Plain Sputnik”, named after the first artificial satellite sent into the space with the Soviet Union.

The nitrogen, the main component of the atmosphere of the planet

Another discovery, the researchers found that the atmosphere of Pluto, formed mainly of nitrogen, escapes the dwarf planet, because of its low gravity, at a fairly significant rate “of about 500 tons per hour,” said Fran Bagenal, a scientific mission. It hopes to refine its estimates and better understand this process with future deliveries of data sent by the probe.

The teams Nasa had closely observed fairly high mountains, about 3500 m above sea level on the photos sent Wednesday by New Horizons. This should gradually send all the data collected during its Tuesday overflight within 16 months. “The probe is now at 3.5 million kilometers of Pluto (she went as close to 12,400 km, Ed) and it works as planned,” noted Alan Stern, principal scientist for the mission. He estimated that it had sent yet only 2% of the data collected earlier in the week.

“We are only in the early days of our analysis after the close overflight probe “, resumed Jeffrey Moore. “As amazing as these images, we are only at the very beginning of our investigations, we always faced a number of assumptions and we know that definitive conclusions now would be dangerous.”

See also: NASA unveils images of Pluto spremières color

see also: What is it like Pluto

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