FLAGSTAFF — As NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft zooms ever closer to Pluto, it is sending back images that make even seasoned scientists’ eyes go wide with excitement.
“Like a kid in the candy shop,” said Jeff Hall, director at Lowell Observatory.
So far, the spacecraft’s cameras have revealed several fuzzy features on Pluto — a white donut-shaped area; an elongated dark smudge measuring some 1,800 miles in length that astronomers are calling “the whale”; a bright region that forms a heart and a string of black spots, each about the size of Missouri, that have gotten the nickname the “brass knuckles.”
From the images, it appears that darker regions are clustered around Pluto’s equator. It’s possible those spots could be evidence of material from Pluto’s inner regions that has been exposed as a result of impacts from incoming meteorites or other celestial objects.
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“We’re seeing probably ice caps, geologic features like valleys and mountains,” said Gerard van Belle, an astronomer at Lowell. “We’re kind of picking things out that would be like finding the continents on Earth right now.”
It’s also becoming apparent that Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, are very different colors — Charon is a grayish color with a black blob on its pole, while Pluto is more of a beige, reddish, ruddy color, Hall said.
So far, there hasn’t been evidence of volcanoes on the icy planet, but that’s another distinct possibility, van Belle said.
