These mountains certainly look as if portions of something (cratered crust?) has been broken up, transported and jumbled:

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As do these in Hillary Montes:

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These seem to imply that the nitrogen ice flow (if that's what it is) is quite substantial, or that the flow is combined with some unknown process.

Layman here...

[Hope I'm not repeating someone else's idea]

Looking at how much higher the albedo of Sputnik Planum is than the rest of the planet leads me to wonder - could this be a 'cold trap' - an area which absorbs less sunlight, due to its brightness, and is thus colder than the rest of the surface?

Once started, this could lead to a self-expanding area in which nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and methane preferentially freeze out of the atmosphere, maintaining the bright color even in the presence of the tholin drizzle.

On more normal planets, with low polar inclinations, cold traps will naturally form at the poles, as we see on Earth and Mars. Is there a mechanism which might make the Sputnik Planum area 'special'?

Just idle speculation...

ce

Anyone else interpreting these as terraces (towards the top in the Charon raw image)?


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A nice-looking valley on Pluto, leading into some sort of depression:

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The Hydra image in this set is one of mine that I stacked and deconvolved. We still don't have lossless versions of those images on the ground, so better versions of this will be possible someday.

As for the Charon images, they were ride-alongs as the I think LEISA was scanning Charon, so short exposures had to be used to avoid smearing...that wrecked havoc on the compressed version we have down...much better versions of these images will be available after the full dataset is downlinked.

Rough context for the Charon high res image:

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Haze layers from the LORRI camera.
Credit for the raw images: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

This part looks more frosted rather than flowed over.

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Astonishing new view of this dynamic glacier!

I notice that along the coast, the "fluid" tends to turn around like a whirlpool. It apparently erodes the coast and produces bays with its whirlpool effect.
Maybe Pluto has its "Baie des Anges" (bay of the Nice area, France).

An ice which behaves like a liquid: surprising!

Rough location of the Charon frame.
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It would need to be reprojected to actually apply it properly.

Edit: ugordon beat me to it, and even leveled it nicely.

My version of Charon LORRI image.

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They say that Norgay Montes and Hillary Montes are of same origin, didn't they? In this case, as We have Sputnik planum as one area, I'd suggest they call the mountain area the Everest Ranges.

If someone wants the HD images from the conference (including the mosaic), they're all here (extremely well-hidden on the New Horizons website!):

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/Press-...uly-24-2015.php

These are just the slides from the presentation (not the standalone isolated images), but they're good enough, 1920x1080 each.

Radial cracks (or something):

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Wind streaks?

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Trying a little math: If the atmospheric escape is 140 kg N2 lost per second = 4.4*10^ kg/yr.
And Sputnik Planum is the source region.
The elevation lost from the ~ 40 degree * 40 degree area of Sputnik Planum would be ~6.4 m per million years.

Assuming I didn't goof up somewhere.

It could be. If you look at a nitrogen glacier moving into a crater, it looks more like it's eroding away what was there rather than filling it up.

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My hand-stitched 2x2
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So there are glaciers.... are there not moraines?

Thought: could those huge mountains actually be moraines of tremendous scale? As I noted earlier (scroll back several pages), those "smooth slopes" look to be loose material at its angle of repose. It sounds crazy, but could those be moraines of truly massive scale? The only issue is that I expect moraines to be elongated... So between the size and the non-elongated shape, I doubt it. But I still expect some kind of moraines, somewhere... loose debris at its angle of repose (aka, steady slopes of uniform angle) at the edges of glaciers (present or past)

Anyway, so thrilled to see it confirmed that there's fluid flow! So hey, what's the viscosity?

The last two pluto frames have been uploaded. Yay! IIRC, we're still missing one from Charon?

Is that cloud really there? One O'Clock on the horizon.

We may need higher resolution to see moraines, but to my eyes there are drumlins. And lots of U-shaped valleys in the hills on the north edge of Tombaugh Regio. Looks like a lot of expansion and retreat of glaciers.

Edit because the drumlins are in a different frame...

I think the Milky Way from the Sky Simulation software.

Thanks

Cool piece today in Science by Eric Hand about the processing of the 13 July failsafe image of Pluto:

http://news.sciencemag.org/space/2015/07/h...and-nearly-lost

So... the new detail of the majority of the northern hemisphere, particularly the polar plains, is really very interesting when it comes to cratering.

The entire region looks like it retains shadows of an ancient, heavily cratered terrain, but that the ancient terrain is heavily eroded. (I was about to say "weathered," and that may yet be the correct phrase.) It looks like craters larger than 50km or so are all ancient. And I see very little indication of any fresh craters of any size.

I don't think we're seeing merely effects of frost deposition/sublimation. A lot of new material has been added to this terrain, and the remains of the crater forms are both filled in and eroded away. So, while the resurfacing here isn't completely covering up and destroying the old terrain, I would argue we are seeing slow resurfacing happening, that over billions of years is very slowly erasing the early cratering history. Give it another couple of billion years and the crater remnants may go completely away.

There have also been tectonic deformations that have wiped out ancient cratered terrain around them, as well as transforming ancient craters into long troughs and connecting several into local elongated depressions. This, too, acts to reshape and resurface the terrain.

So, even though we do see remnants of the ancient cratered terrain, I don't think that means there is not a resurfacing process that continues to this day.

-the other Doug

Just Beautiful. Sigh...

back to lurking...

Where do you start with all the things going on here! Good job there are a few weeks to unpick this puzzle before the next lot of images. This could take a while. I have checked out the "humungous" mountain on ZLD's true colour image.

ZLD that experimental process you started working with is looking really brilliant, there were strong signs of all this in those early images.

More on "Stern Montes" tomorrow.

Yes. I'm still very cautiously optimistic but I intend to do a good writeup about it when I fully understand what is going on during the process. It seems to be quite consistent in how it works. On other bodies, it seems to function quite well in the same regard. the HST image of Pallas for instance, I can see quite a few items that would be quite consistent with cratering. Quite strikingly, I was able to pull out details in the first decent resolution MVIC press release, that would be consistent with the linear features in the heart as well. I really don't understand how thats possible but its there.... It just is...

I just want to call this milkshake terrain! It literally looks like milkshake dispensing into a cup

Here is a quick, crude stereo view, derived from overlap in the high-resolution mosaic of Tombaugh Regio.


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Here's my take on the seven available frames of the LORRI mosiac of Charon (rimshot):

LORRI Mosaic 0725 7FR by Orion Moon, on Flickr

Contrast enhancement of Sputnik Planum:

Sputnik Planum by Orion Moon, on Flickr

I recall saying to someone earlier that the science teams would have some regrets about not seeing the intriguing Charon-facing hemisphere, but it seems now that they couldn't have planned this better.

Yes it seem that nitrogen ice glaciers have a different viscosity, elasticity - er lets say "toffee-ity" than the more familiar water ice counterpart.
Could it be that a buildup of nitrogen ice in the central area cause a flow to the edges trying to reach equilibrium, and when it reach the edge or any obstacle create the whirls we've noted?
Though I do not expect this to have happened fast, the features we see could have been created be a very slow process.

@JRehling Hopefully a bit warmer yes, I feel quite less than eager to try frozen nitrogen toffee in my lungs thank you.

I spent longer than I care to admit manually stitching this.

I, for no obvious reason, imposed a rule on myself for this one, that I wouldn't let myself scale the frames to fit properly; I made myself scale them based solely on the distance-to-target metadata, so I picked the center frame as the base, and scaled the other frames by a factor of f_n = d_n/d₀. This actually worked well for most of them, but it got a little hairy toward the limb as one might expect, so if you look closely on the far right, you might notice some mountains near the terminator that are slightly blurry. I also made myself use nothing but GIMP to do it. I have no idea why, so don't ask.

So, this area of Pluto is kind of anti-Io i.e glaciers/volcanoes.
I'm wondering if N2 glaciers allow cracks and Penitents formation?
I wanna climb there...

That's magnificent, Herobrine.

There's a lot of subtle fine structure going on in those frigid plains; it's like looking at roads in the Mojave from the air. It seems like the darker materials from the surrounding geography are bleeding into/onto Sputnik Planum around the northern margins. Utterly fascinating.

It shows and its appreciated. Great work!

Yes, Herobrine, I can spend hours staring at your stitch. All those "bubbles" and convections remind me now of Jupiter atmosphere.

Cropped and stretched from Herobrine's mosaic:

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Dan Delany spoke of perceiving transparency in the ice in post #1027. Looking at this multitude of dark fuzzy dots and smudges, it's very easy to imagine the broken and sunken wreckage of Cthulhu and environs peeking through a frozen sea.

My mosaic, assembled in Microsoft ICE (with one frame added and blended manually, as the software couldn't register it), auto-levelled and rotated so that north is approximately up:

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Medium rez: http://s12.postimg.org/mv0o1jj59/lor_02991...3_stitchwow.jpg
Full rez: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wildespace/19803197558

Makes me wanna ride a snowbike or deer sledge across those plains.

Stepped away for a bit in anticipation of the UMSF imagewizards doing what you all do best...never a disappointment!!! Thank you.

What an astonishingly strange landscape. Hard for me to see any analogues with Triton at all now in terms of landforms. Few if any familiar processes immediately evident aside from cratering given that the behavior of N2 glaciers at 0.06g is probably gonna differ in subtle ways from water ice glaciers on Earth.

Been a pretty good 4-5% of total data thus far.

On the larger scale mosaic image it is possible to define quite well the topology of the surface beneath the ice. There are similarly shaped formations all over Pluto as Dvandorn pointed out, recording a long history of impacts with other icy KBOs and the round craters that record secondary impacts and the fallout from the process that formed the binary system. Most interestingly the same Tombaugh shaped formation is visible in the image of Charon, only its not filled with a huge mound of ice. There is a brilliant example at Pluto's North Pole. Tombaugh without the ice. Its all flowed out of the basin onto the plains. Right next to it is a far older and more eroded example running in the opposite direction away from this viewpoint. These "ice cream cone" shaped formations of all sizes, ages and orientations are visible across the surface of Pluto.

MOD NOTE/EDIT: The mechanism by which the Plutonian satellite system formed has not been positively determined; please don't state what is at this time merely one hypothesis as a fact.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/124013840@N06...eposted-public/

EDIT:- Indeed! "possible fallout".
Here is an unannotated version of the above.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/124013840@N06...eposted-public/

(Beautiful images, thank you all!)

The following is speculation from a newbie...

I have been trying to create a mental image of a temperature map superimposed on the images of Tombaugh Regio, and trying to imagine how the temperature changes with time in this region, as Pluto's year progresses. It seems to me that the upper part of the heart is more fluid than the lower part which is more frozen, which seems natural given that, as I understand it, it has been receiving more sunlight on average (it's closer to the center of the iluminated hemisphere). Making an analogy with the Earth and thinking that the exterior of the heart is "land" and that the heart is "ocean" (viscuous/solid/freezing), and supposing that the heat capacity is different ("land" heats/cools more than "ocean"), it could help explaining that the little peaks that appear in the heart ("islands") would be hotter and that cell boundaries would tend to be located there, freezing later than the central parts of the cells. I am assuming that boundaries are locally warmer, freezing later. It would then seem natural that boundaries seem to irradiate from these peaks/islands, tending to join other islands. In this view, darker cells would tend to be shallower/warmer regions (where "ocean" would be closer to hotter "land" - but note that there are other factors too, such as proximity to the regions receiving more sunlight, etc) and white cells would be more frozen. In that case, if Pluto is approaching a sort of "Winter", the upper part of the heart would also freeze and become whiter as time passes.

The small islands in the heart, and also mountains close to the "ocean" seem to be eroded, possibly because the ocean ciclically expands and contracts, raising and lowering its average level, causing friction in the islands (which also creates heat, contributing to a slightly higher temperature near the islands/shore/cell boundaries).

(of course, this is a huge simplification... another look near the upper shore of the heart made me wonder at all the slow movement that may be occuring along the submerged valleys/hills... there should be more movement in regions far from from the static shore, so it's much more complicated...)

Your ideas describe the surface influences very nicely. The proposed curtains of darker Talus at the base of mountains, would absorb more energy and be "warmer" than the surrounding ice hills. Patches of older surface showing through the ice would tend to expand and exert pressure on the icy polygons, possibly creating their convex profiles. Under the ice influences seem to play a significant role too. Trapped gases under the ice, as discussed in the briefing.

A breached crater wall in an area that looks like it has experienced, or is, some sort of flow (i.e. notice the flat and smooth terrain):

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A crater that looks like it has a valley entering into it:

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An analogy to Martian river valleys?

Nice to see you on the forum again Exploit, and thanks for posting this mosaic. Lots to explore in this for a while. Perhaps this was planned to aim the flyby to see the Heart closeup, based on the HST and Eclipse data from the past decades?

Here is a 4K map version that I can now post.

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This has the new 2x2 mosaic included that approaches being sufficient for a map at this resolution. I also included some additional approach images, and improved the navigation and colorizing.

Yes, as was brought up earlier, this part of Pluto was known to have a unique carbon monoxide signature (2005) and was therefore specifically selected for closer investigation.

Thanks for the reminder. It's interesting that the albedo variations of the Heart also show up in the HST/Eclipse maps.

Ultreya!

By all means...

Ultreya! Ultreya!

An attempt to colourise the my mosaic with Ralph data (from the global high-rez image link)

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I couldn't align all the features, but I think the result is decent.

~~~

I am wondering, which Ralph image was used for this colour data, and can we access it anywhere? I have a suspicion that the Ralph image that is being used is low-rez, and thus gives a more uniform colouration, lacking in smaller details. The global views we've seen so far are almost monochrome.

Great stuff people.

I just want to make a small observation that the large craters in the dark "Cthulu" region, which is surmised to be billions of years old, don't look that eroded to me. You can still see central peaks in some of them, and the rims look crisp. Of course some processes on earth are different, however for comparison, Manicouagan crater is only 200 million years old, and has been run over by glaciers, probably several times. OTOH, the craters inside of Tombaugh regio look battered and flattened, somewhat similar to Manicouagan . So, like earth, Pluto's glaciers are a regional, local and not global phenomenon?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manicouagan_crater

I'm starting work on a Poster Session on the Geomorphology of Pluto.

It's a work-in-progress, but here is the initial Index image:
https://univ.smugmug.com/New-Horizons-Missi...ron/

--Bill