New Horizon’s discovery

It’s been almost ten years since NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft embarked for the Pluto system exploring deep space. It just completed the first-ever flyby of Pluto, a dwarf planet and the first Kuiper Belt Object ever explored. The spacecraft can either make observations or communicate with Earth, so for now it’s focusing on getting more data and sending back just the barest, highest-priority data in its failsafe downlinks.

Even that tiny trickle of data has been enough to completely overthrow our theories of what is expected to find at the icy little world and its family of moons. Once the data is analysed, the scientists could make an accurate measurement of the dwarf planet’s size: 2,370 kilometres (1,473 miles) in diameter, give or take 20 kilometres. This makes it the largest dwarf planet, and the undisputed King of the Kuiper Belt.

It’s challenging to describe the terrain of Pluto because it’s a complex, diverse world with distinct regions. It has a polar cap of methane and nitrogen ice, with more methane unevenly distributed across the surface of the dwarf planet. The darkest regions have yet to be explored in detail, but are already bearing the names of dark gods. Instead, the New Horizons spacecraft specifically targeted the bright heart of Pluto (named Tombaugh Regio for discoverer Clyde Tombaugh) for its close-up photographs.

The most shocking part of Pluto was found far fewer craters than expected. In all the close-up images released so far of the Tombaugh Regio, not even a single crater was seen. Instead of an ancient, inert rock,an icy world with active processes creating fresh surfaces within the past 100 million years was found. That’s younger than the Appalachian Mountains!