NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft snapped this remarkable panoramic view of Pluto’s crescent on July 14, 2015. This picture, taken with the spacecraft’s wide-angle Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera, reveals with exquisite detail glaciers of frozen nitrogen, icy mountains and haunting hazes.
This panoramic image provides evidence for a remarkably Earth-like ‘hydrological’ cycle on Pluto.Bright areas east of the icy Sputnik Planum appear to have been blanketed by exotic ices, which may have evaporated from the surface of Sputnik and then been redeposited to the east.The new image also reveals glaciers flowing back into Sputnik Planum from this blanketed region; these features are similar to the frozen streams on the margins of ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica.
“We did not expect to find hints of a nitrogen-based glacial cycle on Pluto operating in the frigid conditions of the outer Solar System. Driven by dim sunlight, this would be directly comparable to the hydrological cycle that feeds ice caps on Earth, where water is evaporated from the oceans, falls as snow, and returns to the seas through glacial flow,” said Dr Alan Howard from the University of Virginia."Pluto is surprisingly Earth-like in this regard. And no one predicted it,” added Dr Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, principal investigator for New Horizons.
“This image really makes you feel you are there, at Pluto, surveying the landscape for yourself. But this image is also a scientific bonanza, revealing new details about Pluto’s atmosphere, mountains, glaciers and plains,” he said.
The image also reveals new details of hazes throughout Pluto’s extended atmosphere.
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