Beginning to look like a fuzzy, slightly paler version of Mars, Pluto seems to have a huge diversity of surface features, even from a distance of over 9.5 million miles (15 million kilometers) and it’s beginning to look like the dwarf planet has two very distinct hemispheres. One “face” is smooth, with large dark features; the opposite side appears to have a peculiar series of spots spanning Pluto’s equator, all roughly the same size, around 300 miles (480 kilometers) in diameter.
“It’s a real puzzle — we don’t know what the spots are, and we can’t wait to find out,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons’ principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute, in Boulder, Colo. “Also puzzling is the longstanding and dramatic difference in the colors and appearance of Pluto compared to its darker and grayer moon Charon.”
Indeed, the difference in color is becoming more pronounced on every image release. Pluto has a ruddy yellow hue, whereas Charon’s color appears to have more in common with our moon than Pluto. It is worth noting, however, that these images are still very early in the flyby game, so we’ll need to be patient until we start drawing any conclusions about surface composition or whether Pluto possesses clouds in its thin exosphere.
In other news from the Kuiper Belt, the New Horizons infrared spectrometer is online and has detected frozen methane on Pluto’s surface. Astronomers have known about the spectroscopic signature of methane on Pluto since 1976, but the mission will study the distribution of this molecule around the dwarf planet to see how it varies.
Read more at Discovery News
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