12.4 Pluto and charon  (Page 5/6)

First close-up views of pluto

Pluto is not the geologically dead world that many anticipated for such a small object—far from it. The division of the surface into areas with different composition and surface texture is apparent in the global color photo shown in [link] . The reddish color is enhanced in this image to bring out differences in color more clearly. The darker parts of the surface appear to be cratered, but adjacent to them is a nearly featureless light area in the lower right quadrant of this image. The dark areas show the colors of photochemical haze or smog similar to that in the atmosphere of Titan. The dark material that is staining these old surfaces could come from Pluto’s atmospheric haze or from chemical reactions taking place at the surface due to the action of sunlight.

The light areas in the photo are lowland basins. These are apparently seas of frozen nitrogen, perhaps many kilometers deep. Both nitrogen and methane gas are able to escape from Pluto when it is in the part of its orbit close to the Sun, but only very slowly, so there is no reason that a vast bowl of frozen nitrogen could not persist for a long time.

Global color image of pluto.

[link] shows some of the remarkable variety of surface features New Horizons revealed. At the right of this image we see the “shoreline” of the vast bowl of nitrogen ice we saw as the smooth region in [link] . Temporarily nicknamed the “Sputnik Plains,” after the first human object to get into space, this round region is roughly a thousand kilometers wide and shows intriguing cells or polygons that have an average width of more than 30 kilometers. The mountains in the middle are great blocks of frozen water ice, some reaching heights of 2 to 3 kilometers.

Diversity of terrain on pluto.

[link] shows another view of the boundary between different types of geology. The width of this image is 250 kilometers, and it shows dark, ancient, heavily cratered terrain; dark, uncratered terrain with a hilly surface; smooth, geologically young terrain; and a small cluster of mountains more than 3000 meters high. In the best images, the light areas of nitrogen ice seem to have flowed much like glaciers on Earth, covering some of the older terrain underneath them.