Definitely. Completely different appearance at this scale above all. So much for the 'Triton clone' bias...

EC, welcome back, and thanks for the (as per your norm) stunning contribution!!!

Still shaking off five years of rust here. Playing around with the screencapped mosaic shown at the last press conference, overlay with May's 2x2. Looking forward to seeing more raws.

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Edit: Scalloped margins in the southeast portion of Tombaugh remind me of plateau features on Io, like Tvashtar Mensae.

Excellent processing guys; the geology is now more pronounced for sure. Thanks Emily for Dr May's link and his stereo pair... to my eye, the 'ice-cream' above the 'cone' is now looking more circular yet raised above the surroundings. Without topographic data it's not clear.
Can't wait for more scrumptious tidbits!

A couple of big trough systems roughly radial to Tombaugh.

Impact basin, with a great deal of post impact modification?

(but also trough systems NOT radial to Tombaugh, so???)

p

I agree, there are lots of recognizable features that lead to interpretations but I'm also seeing those 'contradictory' features that are showing us the Pluto system is a lot more interesting than we had a right to expect. It's frustrating at this embryonic stage of data release but that's only going to change for the better in the coming years. I'm glad Dr Stern is already working on a lander.

This area north-west of the heart looks a lot like chaos terrain (just east of a massive canyon candidate there):

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I also note that these two craters close to the heart appear to be filled in with the same stuff that the heart is made of or covered with:

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In the high-resolution imagery we've seen thus far, quite consistently has white terrain corresponded to lowland and dark terrain to highland; so I'd guess that the boundary there represents a significant change in elevation.

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Regarding craters, there are certainly a lot features that look very similar to craters, but not all of them might actually be craters. Not the least because we have areas almost completely devoid of craters, so crater removal might be going on other places, too.

If the dark terrain consistently does represent highland, it could be appear older because less frost will deposit and sublimate at higher altitudes and cause less erosion.

Like I said before, i'm just glad that the canyons and fractures to the north west of the heart are going to be imaged at high resolutions (and are coincidentally within the strip of terrain that will be imaged at 70 m per pixel resolution!).

But strangely, unless my eyes are off or something, the craters in the north - while numerous - all look abnormally flat, as if eroded. However, craters toward the equator look fresh and preserved. I have no clue why that would be.

And as elsewhere was noted, a couple of them look "filled in" with shiny ices.

If the difference between the dark terrain and the light terrain really is topography, like the craters suggest, then there must be a very steep cliff at that boundary between the whale's head and the heart.

Nafnlaus: I'm wondering if that's just the sun angle to the surface. Overhead sunlight at the polar creating less shadowing and hence less definition to those nearer the equator/southern areas.

I see a dead straight line going from the 10 o'clock position (if it were a clockface) all the way down to the left side of the Heart. Surely an artifact of the stitching, right? Probably best to clean it up.

I don't think so. Look at the light-bottomed crater with the central peak with the fissure running to its left just left of Tombaugh Regio. We'll call it "A". Now look at what appears to be a canyon or graben or similar west-northwest of Tombaugh Regio, north of A. We'll call that "B". On the far left side of the planet you'll see two large dark craters that look almost like rings, one to the northwest (almost out of view) and one to the southeast. We'll call the one to the southeast "C".

Look at the little craters between A and B. You'll see there's plenty of them but they all have that flattened, eroded look. Now go straight left and look at the craters near C. They look deep and well formed, not at all eroded. Now one could say maybe that's because we're getting closer to the limb. But the craters in the limb further north all look eroded. As do the craters right near Tombaugh Regio on its eastern side,

I mean, I suppose it could be about light, maybe... but it looks to me more complicated than that.

I agree a lot of the craters appear far more eroded or frost/ice filled. The simplest explanation is they predate the impact at Tombaugh and are part of Pluto's pre impact geology. The nicely defined "newer" craters are likely to be associated with ejecta from the big Tombaugh impact event. Given that the surface and "bedrock" are made of volatile ices, I would think a large amount of impact debris and ejecta would have evaporated and only really big chunks would survive to re-impact the surface. This would mean the normal "ray pattern" might be absent from the Tombaugh region, the smaller size ejecta having been vaporised or quickly sublimated away.

"Hot" ejecta when it lands will "melt" the surface ices and form a liquid moat in the crater basin which then freezes to create a shiny inner ring inside the darker crater rim. Fluids that overflow the rim will create a second ice moat around the outside of the crater rim. Those two gig sharply defined craters to the West of Tombaugh are prime examples. It seems to make sense, but whether thats the whole story remains to be seen. To the North West of Tombaugh there is another "mountain in a moat". This is similar scenario, only the inner moat of frozen ice has since sublimated away to leave the chunk of ejecta in an empty depression.

Not clear to me what the "Brian May release" was all about, but the high-res version has been taken down (same server and directory as the low-res version, so it does appear to have been taken down intentionally).

Anyway, the right side of that stereo pair (ie the old image) had quite a bit lower resolution than the version of that image previously released. That should give us hope that the official release of the 2x2 may similarly be even better in resolution...

A sight of relief for me seeing even more craters now, that after getting a first glimpse of them on fredk's negative image some days back.
But yes, Triton have had one at least partial resurfacing phase when it became part of the Neptune system, and might still have receive some in the current orbit. As for comparing the two, I still think there's some features they got in common.

I smoothed pictures of Nix and Hydra then scaled them to make a family portrait of Pluto system.

New pics of Nix and Hydra are out: http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/new-hori...s-smaller-moons

Cool! COuld that black spot at the bottom of Hydra be the shadow of another moon, or an albedo feature?
(nice to hear that Styx and Kerberos images will be coming in October too).

I updated my family portrait with these fresh new pictures

I was initially thinking the spot at the bottom of Hydra was a deep crater, maybe the same thing as the dark spot on the right side in the earlier Hydra image, but the orientation and shape of the moon, plus the fact that the 'crater shadow' got smaller closer to the terminator, makes me unsure if they're the same.

As we all know, a couple of decades ago there were attempts to map Pluto and Charon using mutual eclipse data.

Now that we have reasonably detailed albedo estimates for most of the northern part of the planet, might it be worthwhile to revisit those old data, and try to use them to uncover more details the southern part of the Charon-facing side?

It's got to be an inverse problem. With most of the solution filled in, it may be possible to get a better estimate of the remaining unknown part.

I do realize that the region I'm talking about will likely be partly uncovered by Charonshine photos. Also, the fact that most of the globe has been filled in may tend to amplify noise effects in the remaining part. Still, it's worth mentioning.

All of Pluto's known moons are coplanar, but not coplanar with the sun, so that's unlikely a satellite shadow. Even if there was a moon orbiting in a different plane, it would be incredibly unlikely to catch a shadow like that. The spot looks like a crater to me.

Front view and top view?
Click to view attachment

I talked with Marc Buie about this last week -- he is very eager to get started on this work, and search for more evidence of temporal change on Pluto.

The cross-eyed stereo pics are working so well I'm afraid how long I keep staring at them! Thanks to all doing this wonderful image processing. It's great good fun to witness

Comparison of Hydra notch and features on Eros:

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"Front view and top view?"

probably! Maybe this is how they fit together, but I don't know the two viewing directions so this is just a guess.

Phil

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The news that Pluto has an extended atmosphere and a bow shock zone that extends across the orbits of all the satellites, suggests all the satellites, including Charon, pass through a very diffuse cloud of Solar Wind particles, Nitrogen and Methane or more likely ionic versions of them.

http://www.nasa.gov/nh/pluto-wags-its-tail

The reddish colour on Nix is said to have a bullseye distribution, which might be consistent with the same "face" of Nix being bombarded with these ions, resulting in the production of trace amounts of red Tholins when they react with the Water ice, Carbon Monoxide ice, Carbon Dioxide ice and dust on the surface. Over the millennia this would build up to faintly colour the surface of the leading face, something akin to the explanation for Iapetus's dark hemisphere. I was under the impression that the smaller moons had chaotic, tumbling motions in their orbits, so the same hemisphere/side would not always be the leading one "ploughing" through the ion cloud, so I don't think this is the whole story.

On Hydra the organics may collect in the proposed craters, their shadows creating cold sinks, or on the one side more frequently presenting the leading face, say the top in today's image. Though plausible, at the moment it is probably bordering on speculation and just one of a few possible explanations.

Charon has a faint pink tinge too. The team suggests that maybe because of it's tidally locked alignment somehow, the colder poles acting as a cold sink is one idea suggested, funnels the escaping Nitrogen and Methane from Pluto towards Charon's polar regions. If Charon does have a very tenuous atmosphere of it's own, that would tend to deflect a percentage of this ion cloud around Charon and reduce the amount of these ions reaching and interacting with the surface. Nix and Hydra are said to have an albedo somewhere between Pluto and Charon which might lend credence to this idea.

Glad to hear that. Thanks for responding so quickly!

Actually, now that I think of it -- since Pluto is moving from equinox towards solstice right now -- for the next hundred years or so, the only parts of Pluto visible from Earth will be parts that were mapped by New Horizons. That means we will have a predicted light curve to compare measured photometric light curves with. Any major changes in albedo should be detectable.

Those guys should be able to get some good publications out of that. (Even better, they should be able to keep checking at five year intervals, and publish a two page update in Icarus each time, using the same analysis programs. There's nothing like mileage!)

I still see a large canyon running from Tombaugh Regio roughly North-East that appears to empty in an alluvial fan like patter into the flat plains in the Northern Hemisphere, even in the now higher res 2x2 images. In fact it's more pronounced.

-kap

Image still compressed, but wonderful. A lot of details.
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto-Encounte...0x632_sci_3.jpg

Interesting how the texture of the "smooth plains" seems to change - looks like bands of small scale bumps that are sometimes present and sometimes not. Wonder what that's about?

That really fine-grained terrain in the otherwise smooth plains is so gorgeous, and seeing it together with Pluto's wealth of other bizarre, complex features all in one, unstitched image is so overwhelming it makes my jaw want to hit the floor. What an incredible world. Thank you Dr. Stern and the rest of the people who have made New Horizons possible!

New LORRI picture of Norgay Montes rotated, slightly sharpened and cropped.

Ooh, more of that small-scale bumpy terrain on the otherwise-smooth CO ice(?). I was wondering if we'd see more of it. I wonder if these will turn out to be sublimation features reminiscent of the "swiss cheese terrain" seen on Mars?

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I love this part:

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It has been said before that it looked like a shoreline; in higher resolution it looks a heck lot more like one. That messy terrain is also very interesting.

Also interesting is the dark colour on parts of the mountains, like in the image above.

I noticed in the press release verbiage, that is is reference to some guy named Ted Stryk.
anybody know this guy?


http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/new-hori...-smaller-moons/

These dark lines, streaks and smudges are fascinating:

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As are these cellular structures on the north side of Tombaugh Regio:

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Perhaps these features, along with the polygonal fractures, are related. In this image (borrowed from post # 952 -> http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&p=224315 ):

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1. Cellular/polygonal fracture network.
2. Strips of dark material associated with fractures.
3. Dark features at north side of Tombaugh that resemble #2.
4. Terrain with (seemingly) cellular structure.

We still have no idea what caused (causes) the fractures and dark streaks, but I wonder if the cellular terrain (#4) is what remains when the plains material is removed?

More mountains, dark terrain, and finally... some craters ! :-)

https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/nasa-s-n...n-pluto-s-heart

I wonder if these mountains are ejecta from the big basin that formed western part of Tombaugh Regio, such as Caloris mountains on Mercury or Alps on the Moon.

Indeed Gladstoner, as Sherbert and I (posts #916/917) had alluded to the notion that the cellular structures (top image) might be muted versions of the polygonal terrain (bottom image). They may be partially hidden as they flowed out from Sputnik Planum?

In MarcF's release link we see this second mountain range forms a transition region between Sputnik Planum and the Whale's head. Hard to say if they are ejecta, as they look similar to the mountains we see farther south.

By the way press conference is Friday at 1800UTC.

Caloris basin and Alps on luna were formed during the Late Heavy Bombardment and are over 3 billion years old. The Pluto montes are maybe 100 million years old, according to NH scientists.

From the latest picture, my impression is that the mountains are a result of erosion by ice of the heavily cratered dark terrain.

I wonder if they are something similar to the pitted terrain in the Sputnik Plain image, some type of sublimation feature, in which case it would imply that the apparently flat plain is sloping, roughly from higher in the North to lower in the South and from higher down the centre to lower on either side. Another interpretation might be older terrain features below the ice cap starting to show through. I favour the first, but can't rule out the second.

Looking at the stereo image, just above the dark scallop shapes at about the inside corner of the "L" the plain starts to rise up on the left side like the side of a U shaped valley or the side of a ski half pipe, with what look like more very large mountains along the edge, before it plummets down into the dark region to the left, very much confirming my earlier impressions. I still can't decide if the dark area the other side also plummets down into a chasm. Alexk's version of the false colour image suggests very much so, but the other views suggest not. The grayscale image shows a large curved indent at about 5 O'Clock suggesting an area of deep shadow just above the terminator in this area, so for and against is about even.

The large dark scallop shapes to the left look very much like ice terraces, as mentioned by someone else, stepping down to the left, with terrain of just the merest tip of the whale's nose, dropping away below them. On the earlier image there were similar dark markings to the East of the plain as well, stepping down to the right. This suggests to me that the "cone" is a plateau built up by the Carbon Monoxide outflow from the impact basin further North. The "coastline" look to the edges near the ice mountains looks even more like a fluid has flowed over the surface, in this newer image, and covered the terrain underneath. Possibly the dark linear marks near the tip of the cone are the older terrain just peeking through as the resurfacing layer slowly erodes away, either by atmospheric flow, "wind", from the North, or sublimation. This whole area might be completely different in appearance when the "wind" switches to South to North in Pluto's Autumn (Fall).

"The Pluto montes are maybe 100 million years old, according to NH scientists."

No, the smooth plains could be that young. There are not really any constraints on the age of the mountains. We don't have the resolution (yet) to judge the degree of cratering in the rougher areas, and anyway, if you look at the lunar mountains in high resolution images, their slopes are mostly uncratered as well because of mass wasting (landslides, regolith creep etc). In other words, a 4 billion year old mountain has very few small craters on it, but it's only the regolith blanket that's young, not the mountain. That may be true here on Pluto as well.

Phil

Yes I stand corrected. I just read in the release the dark areas are thought to be billions of years old. The latest image looks wicked;)

A juicy new close-up of the icy mountains and the banded plains: http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/nasa-s-n...n-pluto-s-heart



Could anyone please indicate where this image fits in the overall image of Pluto we've seen?

Wow! Lots of really interesting stuff going on here! I love the angular, chiselled look of those mountains in the bright terrain. And what's up with that darker stuff in the middle of the bright 'cells', that follows the outline of the cell? Could that be due to liquid under the ice surface or something?

Is there a colourised version yet? I'd imagine all you'd have to do would be add a sepia filter but I think the best way to appreciate this spectacular image is in colour.

The new image shows what seems to be a completely filled crater with this bright material.
Look at how smooth or flat it is!
This bright material seems remarkably flexible. Its properties seem to be close to those of a liquid (flat surfaces...).

Maybe it acts or slides like a glacier (with a liquid layer beneath it).

Aha, these two new LORRI images are adjacent, so here's a mosaic of them:

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http://s27.postimg.org/drac99m8z/plut1_stitch.jpg

Looking forward to seeing this incorporated into the global Pluto view.

P.S. let's see if the first "icy plains" close-up can fit into this mosaic.

[Edit] Another version of the mosaic, this time from the just-now added LORRI archve images (hopefully with less jpeg artifacts): http://s24.postimg.org/qnhc3ruph/lor_02991...ci_3_stitch.jpg