NASA scientists from the New Horizons mission are puzzling over how a world that never received more Sun than the Earth at dusk changes its surface, filling craters, breaking bark and building high mountains and smooth hills.
Pluto, for example, seems far from the untouched remnants that have been transferred since the formation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. Its surface is filled with evidence all the time about current, and possibly ongoing, geological processes.
New Horizons were aimed at the study of Pluto and other ice bodies in the Kuiper Belt, located outside the orbit of Neptune. Pluto, and to some extent its large moon Charon, are young and diverse terrains found by New Horizon.
"The landscape is amazingly amazing," mission scientist Jeffrey Moore told reporters at a conference call from the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. The second part of the photos published on Friday shows that parts of the bright, heart-shaped region of Pluto (called “Tombaugh Regio” by Pluto explorer Clyde Tombog) contain a vast, crater-free plain, estimated to be less than 100 million years old.
Recalling a fractured dirty surface, an area called “Sputnik Planum” is divided into irregularly shaped polygons about 12 to 20 miles in diameter. It looks like shallow depressions have appeared. “They can only be a week old and that’s all we know,” said Jeffrey Moore.
Images made by "New Horizon" also show that some grooves have dark material inside. Others are completely surrounded by hills that seem to rise above the surface.
"We suspect that hills can move out of the ground along a crack," said Moore.
