Can't wait to see the high res. Are we talking round pits or something more chunky? Here's what the ends of flowing glaciers look like on Earth:

http://www.deeg.net/images/Fotos/2008_Isla...-Island-047.jpg

On the top, the "ice sheets" are generally quite flat, but where they descend you get a really broken up / chunky / rippled look.

Either way, the "pitted" area doesn't look like floating ice, the way the polygonal / wavy / cellular stuff does.

A cold sea could indeed be able to explain the troughs: if the level of the sea is not stable - some of the liquid could sublimate and vent out, and/or it may be filled up from a source - stress will be produced in the ice cover and it may crack. That black stuff could just be windborne, overlaying local topography in troughs and on hills.

I was just going to say that those chunks of ice look like floating icebergs on some fluid but I was thinking it was a silly idea and maybe it is.

It's not silly at all - see my post above about eutectics. Especially if there's neon there (neon makes it almost too easy to have liquids at Pluto temperatures), but even if there's not. Examples:

* There's various mixtures of N2/CO/CH4/O2, without any neon, that have lower melting points than any of them have individually, including down to nearly 50K (Pluto is commonly said to get up to 55K)
* The temperature could easily get higher than the commonly cited temperature range for Pluto - that's based on very simplistic equilibrium-heating calculations. I'm sure the mission will give us far more accurate data on how hot Pluto actually gets - or at least, how hot it is right now.
* Local variations in temperature can occur in a body, for example, due to differences in albedo. Liquids could flow like "groundwater" from one area to another.
* There could be geothermal heating from within Pluto
* There could be heat from subduction of ices.
* There could be heat from transition between ice phases

And so forth. Beyond temperature, what's needed for liquids is pressure. Nitrogen needs about 18 meters of N2 ice (more if it's "fluffy" (probable) or mixed with other ices). Neon needs about 3x the pressure.

But the basic point is, if you hit the eutectic's triple point, even if the stuff originally fell as snow, it will melt on the bottom.

They don't have to actually melt. Solid methane starts to get sticky and malleable at 50K. Think of the Earth's crust as an analogy.

link

Another thing to consider is large impacts. They will certainly cause localised melting and sublimation for a short time.

In terms of obliteration of surface features, the main consideration would be the sublimation and deposition process. Sublimation will take place wherever the partial pressure of that component is low enough, and will result in a localised drop in surface temperature wherever it is taking place. It's an endothermic process.

In situations where you have thin layers of surface ice on top of volatiles, that will reduce the sublimation and possibly result in highly viscous volatiles beneath the ice.

There is a good terrestrial analogy in the Antarctic Dry Valleys. Obviously, the sublimation of water is at a much higher temperature, and as long as the partial pressure of water is low enough in the "katabatic" winds, sublimation will occur.

Now depending on the exact circumstances, the katabatic wind may actually be close to its water dewpoint, but of course, the absolute humidity is extremely low. The rate of sublimation is determined by the wind velocity, temperature, water dewpoint of the katabatic wind and incident solar energy.

On Pluto, we already know that we have atmospheric nitrogen, and methane. Using the analogy, nitrogen is to the katabatic wind as methane is to ice.

The dark spots remind me a bit of the "Martian Spiders"

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/20...-hirise_big.jpg

Yes, looks like someone has carved them like crop circles ! Who is the fake artist on Pluto ?

That would explain the interruption of the dark regions along the equatorial latitudes under Tombough Regio.

Forget the debate about Pluto: planet / dwarf planet. Pluto is a captured comet.. With all this out-gassing and such an elliptical orbit, what else could it be ?

Something made the orbit less elliptical than a comet even though a range from 30AU to 63AU is pretty elliptical.

BTW, I am not a scientist !!!

Alan Stern's recent paper seeks to answer that very question:

On the Provenance of Pluto's Nitrogen (N2)

Triton also has a mostly nitrogen atmosphere, with some methane and carbon monoxide. It also has carbon monoxide ice on it's surface.

Triton has a retrograde orbit. Could Triton be a captured KBO?

Here's another version of the the image we're waiting for. It was taken from a HD NASA animation, which may explain why we haven't got the image alone yet.

Click to view attachment

Source:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6wK_RHwwY0

Thanks Marvin for grabbing that.

Here's my version, which is a screen grab from the Youtube at 720p and maximum monitor resolution (1600x1200):

Click to view attachment

The location of the mosaic on Pluto (again, from the video):

Click to view attachment

I'd support that. My post 850 was about Pluto system science and I think that's worth a topic in its own right. Sorry I didn't do it.

After staring at this mosaic, I picked out some items of interest:

Click to view attachment

1. This motley mix of terrain and albedo variation. (Edit: just realized this is part of the dark equatorial band, 'Krun' to be exact.)
2. Probable (or possible) structural trends, which could be fault lines.
3. This nest-like feature.
4. Dark albedo features that seem to be more 'stretched' and 'smeared' southward. These may be related to the hills and dark features shown in today's press conference. Plus, the polygonal features themselves abruptly halt at about mid-image (edit: this appears to be where the finely pitted terrain starts).
5. A possible polygonal depression in the flat surface.
6. These rugged valleys.

I can't wait to see what the team are going to come up with when they get all the real data. The advances in climate modelling since NH was launched, the extra ten years of interpreting and using orbiting satellites around Earth and Mars. The team seem very confident that they can get a seriously good idea about how the Pluto system works.

EDIT: I created a new topic for the highly speculative posts. Will probably move more posts from here to there later when I have the time.

(I edited the edit after moving more posts. Pressing on...)

Here is a few color composites from the images released today, much better than I had posted earlier.

This first one is an approximate natural coloring of the landscape.


(click to enlarge)
-original posted image

This one is an enhanced color version to better show variation.


(click to enlarge)
-original posted image

These include the lower resolution video capture of the large frame set and the up close crop that was also released, but not the up close of the first release (probably do that later). These have been further processed to bring out details. As such, its a quick and dirty fit.


----------
Edit
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Uploaded new versions that include the first up-close release. Not a great fit but the idea is there.
I have to say, near the bend of the images, there is a very Triton plume like something that I didn't take note of earlier. Not that resolution lends itself enough to tell, but between this view and the global, it does appear to change somewhat in length.

Hmmm... the darker, wormy-grooved terrain is also present in the southernmost of the two new images, and while the grooves in what I'm calling the wormy terrain aren't exactly straight (they have more of a long-wave pattern), they are all more than roughly parallel to one another. (The small grooves, not the wormy terrain itself.)

Their direction is also generally north-south, with a little northwest-to-southeast component.

My guess in my WAG post about seeing a lot of signs of what looks like wind erosion (or at least gas transport erosion, which is basically the same thing) may turn out to be a good one.

-the other Doug

Responding to a question about Kuiper Belt cratering rates, Jeffrey Moore appeared to say (I went back and re-listened; it's around minute 44) that Hubble can detect features on Kuiper Belt objects that are in the 10s of kilometers in size.

That doesn't sound right to me. Did I mis-hear, did he mis-speak, or is my notion of Hubble's capabilities completely off-base?

He's not talking about Hubble seeing craters on Kuiper Belt objects. He's talking about seeing KBOs and estimating their population distribution. I guess they feel they can infer impact rates on Pluto, presumably from objects originating in the Kuiper Belt.

Where is the "Pluto Speculation Thread" ?

MOD: Here. There's a link a few posts up as well.

Thanks for sharing those, they are amazing. Regarding the Ralph colour information, which image did you use?

ZLD, rough fit or not, those images are amazing. Elevation and detail perception is massively improved. Dvandorn I totally agree. That's very similar to my impression of what I'm calling the "Ropey Mountains".

Also right at the corner of the "L" is the very tip of the "Whale's Nose", where the darkest orange/red colours of organics and Tholins are concentrated, the terrain steps steeply down in a series of broad terraces. It reminds me of terraced fields in mountainous communities here on Earth. The equatorial dark regions are a depression/canyon that runs almost all the way round Pluto. A smaller scale version dominates the face of Charon. The Carbon Monoxide icecap has filled in the canyon and created a "land bridge" across to the Southern Hemisphere.

Down at the tip of the Tombaugh region are the Ice Mountains and the dark plume like blob. Just to the right of the plume looks like a huge rubble pile from either a low velocity impact or an impacting low velocity rubble pile. Its a very circular feature, but at 5 O'Clock rubble can be seen to have fallen off the pile and rolled out of the circle. The central pinnacle of that rubble pile is the gigantic mountain I spotted in the flyover video (at 34s). The "flow" of the icecap seems finally to have come to halt, or been stopped, at the foothills of the "Ropey/Wormy Mountains".

Glaciation phenomena, frost/dust deposition and sublimation would seem to be prime vectors for surface geology on Pluto. Pluto has a Nitrogen cycle and a Methane cycle just as Earth has a Water cycle and like Titan, we can expect geology very analogous to Earth. It appears on Pluto the Methane is being locked onto the surface by reacting chemically to create the dark organic material, a bit like Earth's Carbon being locked up in fossil fuel.

Indeed it is, so it would appear that at least some of the dark areas are highland (and, if I am not mistaken, ironically this particular area was once suggested to be a crater by quite a few people, not only here).

During the conference, they said that the image releases would be "weekly". Did anybody catch as to when the first weekly release would be?

Seems to me that for a while we may be getting as nice of images as the science team - who cares if they're saved as jpeg on the website when we're dealing with the already-blocky previews coming down from the craft?

I believe they said starting in September, after downloading a lot of non-imaging data.

As scientists earlier said, the heart is broken. If you look closer at the exaggerated colour image, you see that we've already photographed some of the heartbreaking terrain (with some extra colour saturation below):

Click to view attachment

Namely, the heartbreaking terrain bends around the the dark terrain. In the LORRI mosaic, there is a very rough correspondence between the cyan terrain above and this glassy terrain:

Click to view attachment

So I think a lot of the heart's right half is made up of this slightly elevated, glassy terrain.

The northernmost parts of the left half are also distinctly more green, so perhaps the really flat and smooth terrain is limited to this area:

Click to view attachment

(the near-true colour global image strongly suggests that the flat plains continue into the north-western part of the right half)

Color is based on my best early guess at true color image here.

Habukaz: I had some confusion at first, interpreting your anatomical observations. As you face a heart, the "left ventricle" is actually on the right, and visa versa. I'm not trying to be cute. If I was, i would go further to suggest that your "northernmost parts of the left ventricle" are actually the right atrium (north of the right ventricle). :-)

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm...pped%29.svg.png

That seems to be about right Habukaz. So the orangey yellow colour we know represents Carbon Monoxide ice dominated formations, the dark orange is areas covered in organics and likely to be very old geologically, for the layer to build up. This includes the Ropey Mountains and the as yet unseen Whale. Whatever process created the Tombaugh region appears to have overlaid the CO ice on a much older landscape. The established structure of the surface is made it appears, very largely of frozen Nitrogen, contaminated with a few other super volatiles, organics and dust.

So what might be the composition of the glassy terrain in between, the light blue/cyan coloured areas. The Water ice mountains in the Norgay region seem to me to be showing up as this colour. So the pale blue right side of the "Heart" and the glassy terrain are likely to be made of Water ice, which has a "bluer" spectrum.

@Charles: Right, I'll stick to left and right halves.

Could I also suggest the green areas are probably largely Methane ice, they match the Ralph lower res, Methane map. The faint green patches on the Sputnik plain could conceivably match the hills and mounds found in the intersections of the polygons. A few have postulated various mechanisms of how these form, generally the "emerging from beneath the surface" ones seem a good match so far.

I am starting to think that the volatile ice layer above the "bedrock" Water ice, should be considered and modelled, as a layer of Pluto's atmosphere.

Or North/South-East or North/South-West cartographic conventions.

I initially (informally) thought of auricles and ventricles but saw problems.

--Bill

In some areas (e.g. around 0 longitude) the canyon system hits me as being something of an escarpment. The dark shadows appear on northern canyon rims appear to outweigh the brightly illuminated southern camera rims. If so then the large area south of the canyon system would sit at a lower elevation. The character of the southerly terrain looks different (smoother) as well. This was my initial reaction to seeing the July 15th Charon release and is borne out too looking at Bjorn's map. This may correlate with limb topography seen a few days earlier.

(Tenative) naming reminders:
Whale = Cthulhu Regio
Carbon monoxide dominated formations in the area of Tombaugh returned thusfar = Sputnik Planum, if I'm not mistaken; it's the same spot, right?
I haven't seen a name for the "Ropey Mountains" yet that I recall.

We don't know yet that the ice of the mountains is exposed. I wouldn't be surprised if it is, but just pointing that out.

While it surely takes a long time for the organics to form, that doesn't mean that they've been where they are for a long period of time. It might, it might not.

We've got an awful lot to learn about all of the amazing weirdness we're seeing... and I strongly suspect that Sputnik Planum and its black-stuff-filled-cracks are going to provide a lot of keys to the puzzle.



You want to call a solid "atmosphere"? The water of Earth's oceans and glaciers have also cycled through our atmosphere at times, but I'm certainly not planning to start calling them part of our atmosphere any time soon

Got it, thanks for clearing that up.

Before the encounter, volcanopele was doing great work (thank you!!) updating the med-res LORRI imaging plan with new map data... has anyone overlaid the narrow LORRI track over the 3 image composite that we have now? It looks like there's overlap.

This was the root reference...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/artic...019103514002206

My take at the colorization of the first LORRI mosaic. I used the full-globe LORRI picture taken on 13 July for colors. It was not easy to warp and merge the two layers. By the way, I noticed the location of the mosaic as given by NASA is wrong.

OK so show us where it really is--or has Gladstone in post 862 already pointed this out?

Gladstoner showed the one from the video. As can quickly be assessed, it is not compatible with the one from the first video. Thomas posted his take on where the mosaic is from.

Just noticed the mosaic outline that I grabbed from the NASA Youtube doesn't extend far enough to the west:

Click to view attachment

Sorry Gladstoner, it was your annotated map that mentioned the "nests". That yellow area to the right is not that well resolved, lighting and contrast issues maybe, or not fully processed to the same level as the Sputnik Plain.

I'm interested in that circular mound a little way above the inner corner of the "L". In the flyby video it looks like, I stress looks like, a burial mound, it is so perfectly circular. I checked it on the higher resolution Sputnik Plain image, it is there too this time with small dark spots on it. It also appears to have a trough running all round it. I find this plain, as others do, very reminiscent of Pingo country, something like this on a far larger scale.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingo#/media/...o_wedge_ice.jpg

EDIT:- Here is a quickly done close up.

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

The angle on the left of the 3-frame mosaic has me wondering if there is something interesting yet to be revealed.

Guess I'll have to wait for next Friday's press conference.

With five images due by then, maybe NASA will relent and release one each day up to Friday, so that Alan can save the best until last again.

Indeed. For starters, I can't wait to see the sharp boundary along the whale's nose.

Here is a quick map using the earlier official Google Maps version with intensity information reprojected in from the best full-disk LORRI image. Please pardon the color artifacts.

Click to view attachment

EDIT July 18 2325UTC: Second image from July 12 is included (now with a different tradeoff of color artifacts)

Emily's blog mentions a 2 frame mosaic of Pluto at 2.2km/pixel. Is that going to be the highest resolution global mosaic of Pluto?

@Gladstoner: thanks for drawing the terrain reference on both photos, makes thing easier.

It's just a suggestion, but I think it could be useful to have a map with tentative naming as reference for everybody.

Matt

My reprojection of the false color images over the Lorri images:

Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment

No. There is big mosaic at resolution ~0.88 km/pix from LORRI and panchromatic global scan of Pluto by MVIC at ~0.56 km/pix.
But even that aren't all pre-flyby global observations with resolution better than 2.2 km/pix.
LORRI took another smaller mosaic with resolution 1.89 km/pix and MVIC acquired global color scan at 0.78 km/pix.