Green = 50% Red + 50% Blue

I took the latest MVIC image, subtracted out all of the filtered color to obtain a green channel.

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This is all supposing that I got the spectra right.

Thats a large part of my interpretation too. Then I saw Thomas's image and it was staring me in the face. The Tombaugh "tongue" is the comets tail impacting the surface as it follows on behind the nucleus. Charon could also have passed through the tail as well. Being further from the nucleus, its chemical composition would be different, perhaps more Nitrogen rich. The red patch at Charon's North polar region is looking a prime candidate for consideration as to where the tail hit.

The 'tongue' appears (to my eyes) to be a fault-bound basin, i.e. a very broad graben, or perhaps a graben-horst-graben complex, with most of the horst covered with the plains material. Now what would cause such a large structure....

Edit: Possible faults marked:

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(ExploitCorporations' image used)

Edit 2:

This structure did seem familiar:

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No, I don't think limestone caverns are responsible for any features on Pluto.

(Credit: Gentile, Richard J., Geology of the Belton Quadrangle, Missouri Geological Survey Report of Investigations Number 69, pgs. 29-35)

But, Sherbert, that far out in the solar system, comets have no tails. Cometary tails are created by sublimation of ices and scattering of entrained dust by a much closer Sol. I don't know of any comets developing tails outside the orbit of Uranus, much less Neptune.

-the other Doug

Pluto has a tail.

Pluto's tail is made of plasma particles. Certainly not enough energy to explosively affect any bodies passing too near.

Come to think of it, it doesn't even require an impact to disrupt tidal lock and melt the ice at Sputnik Planum. The passage of any large body near the system will change the orbital period of Charon, without changing rotation periods. There are likely to be hundreds of bodies as large as Sedna scattered to great distances that pass through the Kuiper Belt at perihelion.

My suggestion to get a green channel with real data would be to use the panchromatic image (Lorri).
That one is the sum of all wavelength (of course, subject to the camera's response).
To keep it simple, let's say that Lorri = R+G+B
You add R + B from MVIC, convert to grayscale and subtract it from Lorri.
You get G.

(In theory you can use a similar tick to get red from Voyager's Violet and Orange channels....)

The only trouble is that you need perfect registration and to compensate for camera response.

I have experimented with this with mixed results - additional processing/color correction is usually needed.

Agreed.
In theory it works, in practice you'd need to calibrate the images (flat field, linearize the response, etc, etc).

(Violet is always a tricky filter to deal with, since it should translate to both the Red and Blue channels. But that's really Voyager related so let's not discuss it here ;-) )

It may not be the best of analogs, but the Plutonian mountains remind me of another celestial location:

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Anyone care to guess where this is?

MVIC actually is capable of capturing panchromatic images and I took a guess that they probably did this to ensure an evenly lit globe. Otherwise, the main filters actually cover just about everything already so I opted to just convert the image to gray scale for this. Otherwise, I more or less performed the steps you mentioned.

Taurus-Littrow valley!

Well, if someone wants to try it, I was just talking a few pages back about the current flat field data
....wait....Access forbidden?
That stuff had been there for the better part of a year. I posted about this yesterday and between then and now they decided to block access to the nh-x-lorri-2-launch-v2.0 dataset. Why am I finding it hard to believe that's a coincidence? ಠ_ಠ
Seriously, go to http://pdssbn.astro.umd.edu/holdings/nh-x-....1/dataset.html and it says at the top a newer version has been publicly released and if you click the link to go to the newer version (v2.0), you get this now:
http://i.imgur.com/8q8pRLu.png
Well, good thing I downloaded all of the calibration data files already . I don't have it on this computer, but in the morning, I'll rehost the v2.0 files on my own server. I don't know if there's even any significant difference between v1.1 and v2.0 of the calibration data.
In the meantime, the previous version of the dataset isn't currently blocked. You can get flat frame data, the response curve, the quantum efficiency data, etc.

Edit, 8 hours later: And now it's saying "Object not found" instead of "Access forbidden", meaning the files aren't even there anymore (they were there earlier, when it was a 403).
Edit, 2 hours after that: It's back now. Really curious what that was all about.
Oh, well, might as well link to the v2.0 stuff now.
LORRI calibration data, which includes things like the response curve, quantum efficiency, and current flat field data.
And the MVIC calibration data can be found here

My impression is that the pits and craters visible on these mountains are preserved impact structures from when they were still part of Cthulhu, similar to how pressure ridges and bands are retained on the surfaces of the disjointed slabs of Europa's chaos regions...essentially that these mountains are a colossal form of frozen landslide deposit.

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Obviously not to scale, and not even the same surface landform, but same general idea.

In my wildly inexpert opinion, the mountains at the margins of Tombaugh Regio are like chunks of dirty slush liberated from their former moorings and refrozen in place, whether by impact or subsurface burp as others here have posited.

As a layman, I am really impressed with Pluto.
Never thought it would be such an interesting place.
I love reading the speculation going on here.

I'm a little dubious of the impact event theory for Tombaugh Regio and am thinking it's more an outgassing event.
Or even 2 or 3 separate outgassing events.
One where the sublimation swept to the east, One where it swept to the west, and maybe the latest one where it settled ontop of itself.

I think there's a puzzle to be solved regarding the troughs in Tombaugh Regio, and there is a relationship between those troughs and the formation of the mountains.

There are some barnacle mountains along the trough edges that are a low rez but haven't really been speculated on, at least in the posts i've read.
But i think it's part of the answer here.

I think there is a relationship between the very shape of these protruding mountains and the correpsonding planar polygonals or even cellular shapes in the plains.


On Edit:
Thinking about it, there probably can only be a single outgassing event, not 2 or 3.
There's no molten core here driving change.

This seems unlikely to me. These "barnacle mountains" (I love the term) each have a pit at the top.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm...naria_shell.jpg

The "barnacle mountain" at the bottom-far-right looks a bit like what we're seeing in the most recent Pluto high rez image.

Apollo 17 landed in this valley. Does anyone know if that bottom-right mountain is an old volcano?

"Does anyone know if that bottom-right mountain is an old volcano?"

We know for sure that it is not a volcano, it's part of the rim of an impact basin, Serenitatis. What things look like is not a very good guide to what they are, so we have to consider everything else we know about the area, its geology and history etc. Naturally, for Pluto, it is too early for us to do that, but most of the interpretations here will probably not be supported by the evidence we collect later.

Phil

They look like it, but I'm not sure that those are pits: The mountain tops are dark, but if the surface maerial is ice mixed with organics than the action of sunlight and cosmic rays could turn it dark over time. The sidea look to me to be exposed by landslides, so they could be brighter because they are more recently exposed and less weathered.

To me these look like blocks of material thrust upwards that have then collapsed around the edges under gravity. On a hunch I'd say they're more likely to be caused by internal activity than impact, but that doesn't automatically mean volcanoes..... but then what do I know?

Next New Horizons press conference/image release in one hour (1800 GMT). Livestream here.

That's 7pm BST for all the Brits out there.

Oh, boy! 49 minutes to go
Also, there seems to be a new published version of Pluto-in-color today. https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/pluto-da...-in-false-color

A bit confused by the resolutions of the different versions of the 2x2 mosaic we've seen, including the latest 'true colour' release. Hope we'll see a full resolution version at/after the press conference.

Also, hoping we get the crescent departure image - maybe we finally get to see the atmosphere.

Looking at that image, the Northern half of the impact basin has actually been hollowed out. There appears to be a sizeable cliff half way down it. The Northern crater rim looks to have been scoured clean of Carbon Monoxide to reveal the material of the rim. This has all the looks of "wind" erosion, on a pretty big scale too. Press conference images should reveal more. Is it a Humungous Mountain?

This is going to be good!

News conference placard up now on NASA TV.

Gah, new images are out: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhoriz...main/index.html

Whoa. Let's see what they have to say...conference has started.

There may also be more images released - nothing of Charon there.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-horizons-d...g-ices-on-pluto
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-horizons-r...arply-decreased
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/stunning-night...to-s-hazy-skies

Apparently, effectively no atmosphere on Charon per the UV occultation, or it's of truly extraordinary thinness. So much for the shared-envelope idea.

Ice flows on the northern edge of Sputnik Planum:

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Screen capture of 7 image mosaic

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Same here. I'm honestly baffled that this is 'true color'. If you look at the color data, it is nothing but orange, which would suggest to me data from the red channel.

But... I investigated a little further an played with the color channel a bit and was able to draw out much more detail.

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Crop & contrast enhance to show the mentioned "streamlines" in the ice flow. Beautiful.
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Nitrogen glaciers, whoa! And a relief to my poor imagination, even though it's an alien substance. It is at least a concept my poor worn out brain can understand. =)

Screencap of the 7-image mosaic alan posted, before the annotations were turned on.
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Edit: Err, just realized the quality isn't as good as alan's, which somewhat defeats the purpose of posting it.
So, let me distract you with this flyover screencap.
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And your lungs are 78% filled with it right now, although it's a bit warmer.

Hmm. Pluto is extremely spherical. No evidence of oblateness from assumed past rapid rotation. No mention of a fossil tidal bulge either, which I actually would have expected from Charon's influence.

That will probably set some interesting constraints on internal models.

I like how complex the terrain north of the heart is; not just old and cratered. Keep it that way, Pluto, keep it that way.

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NASA News Conference – Update on Pluto - July 24:
http://www.space-multimedia.nl.eu.org/inde...;catid=1:latest

Raw images are posted! http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto-Encounter/

The nightside in Charonshine is up on the SOC raws page. This appears to be the "polygonal" crater seen on approach:

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Edit: Nope, that's Charon. Wow!

That can't be right, it says Charon as target and the exposure is set at a low 60 ms. That has to be Charon's dayside.

^ That's Charon.

Here's a sinuous feature:

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(which I am sure everyone saw, kinda redundant )

My version of the Charon image. Adding noise as EC did does improve the blocky appearance, but this stretch is a bit different and maybe shows something different.

Phil

Click to view attachment

Anyone know why the Charon image is so noisy? If it's the sunlit side, shouldn't the exposures be as good as the Pluto shots we've seen with respect to noise levels (if less resolution due to the slightly further distance)?

Also any chance one of you wizards can stack the Hydra 2x2 to get some more detail? Looks like at least part of it was captured in all 4 images.

-kap

It's not noisy, it's just jpegged to hell like all the other images.

An attempt at using the false color global image to colorize the ice flows image.
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