New Horizons, NASA's spacecraft that performed recently the first Pluto flyby in mankind's history, has detected signs of a Pluto "tail". NASA scientists presume that he phenomenon is created by the escaping atmosphere of the dwarf planet.
NASA reports revealed that New Horizons team has fresh findings about Pluto, including the existence of a tail and a close-up of a vast icy and "cracked" plain. NASA's director of Planetary Science, Jim Green, has declared in press conference in Washington, at NASA Headquarters, that the New Horizons mission had a historic week. Alan Stern, the Pluto mission's principal investigator added that now Pluto is becoming a brand and he thinks that the last planet in our solar System is the best to explore from them all.
Pictures of Nix, one of Pluto's tiny moons, from the Southwest Research Institute, shows twice as many pixels as the best photos taken from Earth's astronomic observatories, despite the low resolution or those taken with the Hubble Space Telescope.
Another image has revealed an excess of the gas carbon monoxide over the heart shaped and bright region. Stern declared that elsewhere on Pluto hadn't been detected other concentration of the gas anything like that.
In honor of Clyde Tombaugh, the bright zone has already been called informally Tombaugh Region. Clyde Tombaugh is the astronomer who discovered the planet Pluto in the year 1930. Within this bright zone on Pluto, and north of the dwarf planet's icy mountains, lies a vast plain 12 miles (20 km) wide, devoid of craters. The plain shows some polygonal irregular pattern that resembles cracks, but it is still necessary more research before the team can come with a theory on how they formed.
The leader of the GGI at NASA's Ames Research Center, Jeff Moore, declared for the press conference that the landscape revealed by New Horizons' photos is just truly amazing. Some younger regions have no craters at all and show signs that geological processes are still happening up on Pluto to the present time. The "cracked" region has some irregularly shaped segments, but appears overall smooth.
Pitted surfaces and hills are rising above the terrain. Another feature that intrigued the researchers was a line of smudges. The team of researchers at NASA thinks that these smudges might be streaks caused by winds on Pluto and they might also point to active plumes on Pluto. More analysis is necessary before this theory can be confirmed.
The New Horizons Atmospheres team could observe the dwarf planet's atmosphere rich in nitrogen far beyond Pluto's surface. It was estimated that around 500 tons of material an hour is escaping from the planet. The ionized escaping gas is what creates a sort of cold and dense "tail" stretching out as far as 1,000 miles (1,600 km) from the Pluto's surface. The researchers also noticed that a significant amount of Pluto's mountain ice was already being removed.
