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Seeing a real life photo of the dwarf planet is not quite enough, you’d think, but New Horizons helps map the geological formation of Pluto too. It was only recently that NASA released a photo the space craft took of the area known as Sputnik Planum on the surface of the tiny member of the Kuiper Belt. But while that was what the public was shown, it wasn’t the only photo taken by New Horizons.

After the staggering discovery that the original picture taken by New Horizons with its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) in July 2015 was actually displaying floating glaciers, because of the density difference between the water ice as well as the frozen nitrogen that the planet’s plain mostly consists of, scientists took a closer look to what are the components that create Pluto’s geography.

Researchers have actually managed to map as much as 1,290 miles across and around the Sputnik Planum in different visual wavelengths, depicting the different types of terrain on the surface of the frozen planet. The colored history of the map that was rendered in a scale of 1,050 feet per pixel should be able to reveal more of the geographical formation of the planet.

Therefore, purple areas indicate the blocky mountain edge of the Sputnik Planum, described by NASA as chaotic and angular and pink is the representation of floating ice. Yellow areas represent well-preserved impact craters while the darker brown areas are various types of uplands. To the west of Sputnik Planum, you can see rugged, heavily cratered material, while the very south western corner of the image shows hummocky mound material and a possible cryovolcanic feature named Wright Mons.

There are a lot of things scientists can gather from images such as this one because they provide a huge amount of insight into the history of the geographical formation of the planet’s surface. Considering that New Horizons has reached its destination and did its purposed flyby of Pluto last summer, now heading to unknown parts of the solar system, this was a secluded chance for humanity to see and try to understand the things that we may not see in person in the next few decades.

The geologic map was obtained by creating a mosaic of the 12 images that the LORRI device took of the planet during its flyby of Pluto from a range of 48,000 miles from the surface. Scientists say that this is a very important resource for the study of the planet as it’s an efficient method of understanding the processes that have undergone on Pluto to result in the planet’s battered and intriguing surface.

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Mere days ago, we were graced with a real life image of Charon as it was taken last summer from the edges of the solar system and now we have even more astonishing news form New Horizons spacecraft. This time it’s about Pluto itself, and the amazing images that were rendered by NASA after the space probe that was launched back in 2006 did a fly by the dwarf planet last year during the summer.

The data that the probe has been feeding and beaming back to Earth along its 10-year trip has provided an immense amount of insight about the workings of our own solar system and truly went where nobody had been before. The newest news feeds from NASA display even more information that New Horizons has gathered from the farthest edges of our solar system; and more explicitly images and recordings of the dwarf planet Pluto.

Scientists have been studying all of the data gathered from Pluto ever since it first started getting fed to them back on Earth. A new analysis suggests that Pluto’s glaciers and made of water ice and that they float similarly to how icebergs do on the surface of the earth.

The reason this is possible is because of a difference in density. Because the water ice that the glaciers are made of has a lower density of the frozen nitrogen that the surface below them has (also common to objects in the Kuiper belt), they tend to ‘float’ or travel slowly. Although the glaciers there remain hard and frozen solid due to the -380 degrees Fahrenheit temperature on Pluto, they seem to break apart and move in a series.

These were conclusions drawn after closely studying the images depicting one particular zone of the planet Pluto – namely the Sputnik Planum. It was detected that the glaciers would slowly move across the flat plane, sometimes as much as 12 miles across it. In earth terms, this would translate in gigantic icebergs that move across the frozen oceans. Except in Pluto’s case, it’s a gigantic frozen surface of nitrogen.

A particular portion of the Sputnik Planum, namely the Challenger Colles, appears to be a large accumulation of these glaciers. Scientists speculate that this is a place where the nitrogen ice below is shallower than in other parts, making the water ice glaciers ‘station’ and gather here. The Challenger Colles zone is 37 by 22 miles, while the entire Sputnik Planum zone is believed to span for about 300 by 210 miles.

The image taken by New Horizons was captured about 12 minutes before the probe’s closest approach to Pluto, from a range of approximately 9,950 miles from the surface on July 14^th, 2015.

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New Horizons Helps Map the Geological Formation of Pluto

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