Friends!!! Are U interested to know more about DWARF Pluto's Geology?

Take a pinch of Mars, a sprinkle of Saturn’s moon Iapetus and a dash of Neptune’s moon Triton—and the recipe will yield something like Pluto.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the .

Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

The first published scientific findings from NASA’s New Horizons mission, which flew past Pluto in July, confirm that the dwarf planet does not resemble any other single world in the Solar System. Instead, its wildly varying terrain is a crazy quilt of geological patterns and textures—copied, pasted and tweaked from other planets and moons.


Like Mars, Pluto has volatile compounds that cycle between freezing onto the ground and sublimating back into the atmosphere. Like Iapetus, it has stunningly bright terrain juxtaposed with dark areas. And like Triton, it seems to have streaks made by wind marring its icy surface.

Pluto’s geological activity is driven both by heat leaking from radioactive elements in its interior—a remnant of its birth more than 4 billion years ago—and by the volatile compounds that flit between its surface and its atmosphere. As Pluto moves away from the Sun in its 248-year elliptical orbit, temperatures plummet and these compounds freeze out of the atmosphere and fall onto the surface as frost. When Pluto warms up again, methane, nitrogen, carbon monoxide and other chemicals transform directly from ice on the surface into atmospheric gases.

 “Punching a hole in jello springs to mind,” says Howett. “Everything suggests this ice is exceptionally soft”—making it unique in the Solar System.

Incredible New Photos Of Pluto Show Blue Skies And Water Ice

Pluto's Blue Sky

"A blue sky often results from scattering of sunlight by very small particles," said science team researcher Carly Howett, also of SwRI. "On Earth, those particles are very tiny nitrogen molecules. On Pluto they appear to be larger – but still relatively small – soot-like particles we call tholins."

Water ice on Pluto. NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

As if blue haze wasn’t exciting enough, New Horizons had another surprise for us this week: water ice on Pluto’s surface. While there aren’t large areas of exposed ice, there are many small regions.

Pluto’s Puzzling Patterns and PitsCredits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

It seems that the more we see of Pluto, the more fascinating it gets. With its prominent heart-shaped feature, icy mountains, and “snakeskin” terrain.

Pluto's Tiny Moons Start Coming Into View


Charon is the biggest game in town, but Pluto has four smaller moons that make for a complicated system.

NASA / JHUAPL

Pluto‬ system family portrait!

Kerberos Revealed. This image of Kerberos was created by combining four individual Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) pictures taken on July 14, approximately seven hours before New Horizons’ closest approach to Pluto, at a range of 245,600 miles (396,100 km) from Kerberos. The image was deconvolved to recover the highest possible spatial resolution and oversampled by a factor of eight to reduce pixilation effects. Kerberos appears to have a double-lobed shape, approximately 7.4 miles (12 kilometers) across in its long dimension and 2.8 miles (4.5 kilometers) in its shortest dimension.

Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

FRIENDS !!! Be CURIOUS!!! OBSERVE!!! ONE DAY U will also DISCOVER something!!!
For more information
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article
http://www.iflscience.com/space/
http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/