Jul 15 2015
From The Space Library
Release 15-152 From Mountains to Moons: Multiple Discoveries from NASA’s New Horizons Pluto Mission
Icy mountains on Pluto and a new, crisp view of its largest moon, Charon, are among the several discoveries announced Wednesday by NASA's New Horizons team, just one day after the spacecraft’s first ever Pluto flyby.
"Pluto New Horizons is a true mission of exploration showing us why basic scientific research is so important," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "The mission has had nine years to build expectations about what we would see during closest approach to Pluto and Charon. Today, we get the first sampling of the scientific treasure collected during those critical moments, and I can tell you it dramatically surpasses those high expectations."
“Home run!” said Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. “New Horizons is returning amazing results already. The data look absolutely gorgeous, and Pluto and Charon are just mind blowing."
A new close-up image of an equatorial region near the base of Pluto’s bright heart-shaped feature shows a mountain range with peaks jutting as high as 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) above the surface of the icy body.
The mountains on Pluto likely formed no more than 100 million years ago -- mere youngsters in a 4.56-billion-year-old solar system. This suggests the close-up region, which covers about one percent of Pluto’s surface, may still be geologically active today.
“This is one of the youngest surfaces we’ve ever seen in the solar system,” said Jeff Moore of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team (GGI) at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.
Unlike the icy moons of giant planets, Pluto cannot be heated by gravitational interactions with a much larger planetary body. Some other process must be generating the mountainous landscape.
“This may cause us to rethink what powers geological activity on many other icy worlds,” says GGI deputy team leader John Spencer at SwRI.
The new view of Charon reveals a youthful and varied terrain. Scientists are surprised by the apparent lack of craters. A swath of cliffs and troughs stretching about 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) suggests widespread fracturing of Charon’s crust, likely the result of internal geological processes. The image also shows a canyon estimated to be 4 to 6 miles (7 to 9 kilometers) deep. In Charon’s north polar region, the dark surface markings have a diffuse boundary, suggesting a thin deposit or stain on the surface.
New Horizons also observed the smaller members of the Pluto system, which includes four other moons: Nix, Hydra, Styx and Kerberos. A new sneak-peek image of Hydra is the first to reveal its apparent irregular shape and its size, estimated to be about 27 by 20 miles (43 by 33 kilometers).
The observations also indicate Hydra's surface is probably coated with water ice. Future images will reveal more clues about the formation of this and the other moon billions of years ago. Spectroscopic data from New Horizons’ Ralph instruments reveal an abundance of methane ice, but with striking differences among regions across the frozen surface of Pluto.
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland designed, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. SwRI leads the mission, science team, payload operations and encounter science planning. New Horizons is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, managed by the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
The Icy Mountains of Pluto
New close-up images of a region near Pluto’s equator reveal a giant surprise: a range of youthful mountains rising as high as 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) above the surface of the icy body.
The mountains likely formed no more than 100 million years ago -- mere youngsters relative to the 4.56-billion-year age of the solar system -- and may still be in the process of building, says Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team leader Jeff Moore of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.. That suggests the close-up region, which covers less than one percent of Pluto’s surface, may still be geologically active today.
Moore and his colleagues base the youthful age estimate on the lack of craters in this scene. Like the rest of Pluto, this region would presumably have been pummeled by space debris for billions of years and would have once been heavily cratered -- unless recent activity had given the region a facelift, erasing those pockmarks.
“This is one of the youngest surfaces we’ve ever seen in the solar system,” says Moore.
Unlike the icy moons of giant planets, Pluto cannot be heated by gravitational interactions with a much larger planetary body. Some other process must be generating the mountainous landscape.
“This may cause us to rethink what powers geological activity on many other icy worlds,” says GGI deputy team leader John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.
The mountains are probably composed of Pluto’s water-ice “bedrock.”
Although methane and nitrogen ice covers much of the surface of Pluto, these materials are not strong enough to build the mountains. Instead, a stiffer material, most likely water-ice, created the peaks. “At Pluto’s temperatures, water-ice behaves more like rock,” said deputy GGI lead Bill McKinnon of Washington University, St. Louis.
The close-up image was taken about 1.5 hours before New Horizons closest approach to Pluto, when the craft was 47,800 miles (77,000 kilometers) from the surface of the planet. The image easily resolves structures smaller than a mile across.
Future Middle School Teachers Receive NASA Lesson in STEM Instruction
Seventeen students from California State University at Fresno, who want to teach middle school one day, received science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) lesson planning instruction in a Pre-Service Teacher Institute (PSTI) Program at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California. Students attended this workshop from June 22–26, and discovered free NASA online resources for elementary and middle school classes and prepared NASA-related Project-Based Learning (PBL) lesson plans.
The year is 2025 and students are given the opportunity to colonize a planet. Once on the planet, they will design and build a vehicle to transport them from one location on the planet to another in order to explore. There are no roads so their vehicle will need to travel off road. The project challenge: Design a rover to explore Planet X. At the workshop, this is the type of project-based learning that is presented to students and future teachers to develop STEM lesson plans.
“Teachers, who have gone through the NASA PSTI program, appreciate learning how to better teach STEM subjects,” said Felicia Bessent, the principal of Edward Harris, Jr. Middle School in Elk Grove, Calif. “They understand that an emphasis on STEM will give their students a foundational preparation for middle school, high school, college, and future careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.”
Project-based learning is a belief that real-life problems better capture students' interest and provoke serious thinking than traditional teaching methods. Students learn and apply new knowledge to the problem-solving context. The teacher plays the role of facilitator, working with students to frame worthwhile questions, structuring meaningful tasks, coaching both knowledge development and social skills, and carefully assessing what students have learned from the experience.
By the end of the workshop, prospective teachers will have attended Lesson Plan Design sessions, using NASA's Beginning Engineering Science and Technology (BEST) curriculum activities, Buck Institute for Education (BIE) Project-Based Learning model, 21st Century Skills, and Fresno State STEM Initiative 2013-2014 Survival on Planet X, a NASA-inspired project. Participants also will have integrated into their lesson plans California Common Core Math and Literacy Standards, STEM standards and skills, and student-centered instructional strategies.
By law, NASA is required to disseminate its information about its activities and results to the widest practicable and most appropriate audiences. To support this goal, the NASA Office of Education develops and manages a portfolio of programs for students and teachers at all levels. The Office seeks to develop a vibrant pool of individuals for the future workforce by attracting and retaining students in STEM disciplines to support national and NASA missions.
“At the end of each summer session, I share information with my site teachers and district supervisors. There has been an increase of student engagement in the classroom, knowledge of NASA missions and projects, and students’ desire to become future engineers, scientists, and mathematicians,” said Bessent.
