A Heart and a Whale With a Doughnut In Its Tail?
July 9, 2015
What do a doughnut, a heart, and a whale have in common? They can all be seen on Pluto’s surface (or, regions that resemble these things can, anyway). As it barrels towards Pluto, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) probe New Horizons continues to generate better images of and more data about the most famous resident of the Kuiper belt (the band of icy bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune).
An image snapped on July 7 by the New Horizons spacecraft while just under 5 million miles (8 million kilometers) from Pluto is combined with color data in this most detailed view yet of the Solar System’s most famous unexplored world. The region shown includes the tip of an elongated dark area along Pluto’s equator already dubbed “the whale.” A bright heart-shaped region on the right is about 1,200 miles (2,000) kilometers across, possibly covered with a frost of frozen methane, nitrogen, and/or carbon monoxide. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins Univ./APL/Southwest Research Inst.
New Horizons is the first space probe sent to study the dwarf planet Pluto. The main goal of the mission is to explore Pluto and its large moon Charon. Mission managers also hope to encounter one or more other objects in the Kuiper belt. The measurements made by New Horizons will help scientists learn about the nature of these Kuiper belt objects (KBO’s), thought to be remnants of the material that came together to form the planets.
NASA launched New Horizons on Jan. 19, 2006. The probe overcame a computer glitch last weekend and is on track to study the Pluto system as it zooms past on July 14, 2015. Even now, it is now taking far better pictures of Pluto than any Earth-based telescope (even the Hubble Space Telescope). As the dwarf planet comes into focus, a few regions of Pluto have been found to look like things here on Earth. A large, dark region in the southern hemisphere resembles a whale. A donut lookalike, a circular light region with a dark spot in the center, is nestled in the crook of the whale’s tail. To the right of the whale’s head is a giant bright region that resembles a heart symbol.
Scientists are not yet certain how these regions formed. They suspect that the doughnut is a large volcano or crater, and that the whale and heart were formed from different chemicals falling from Pluto’s thin atmosphere. After New Horizons passes Pluto, it will take 16 months for the probe to relay all the information it gathered back to Earth. Only then will we know the true story of the doughnut, the heart, and the whale!
Other links:
- New Horizon (NASA site)
- Space exploration (World Book article)
- Space exploration (2006-a Back in time article)
