An Oddly Alien-Looking Visage of Pluto

Take a Long Last Look at THIS Side of Pluto!

Wow.  I got off the plane today heading to Pluto Central and was greeted with tweets and retweets of the latest image of Pluto from New Horizons. And, what a weird place it’s showing us.  It reminded me of an alien Plutonian Cthulu, or maybe even a frozen Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Polygons and dark regions, circular landscape features — all on the Charon-facing side of Pluto. And, doesn’t THAT beg a lot of questions about why it looks like that!  We talked about it over dinner tonight, speculating about the processes that are causing the surface features and asking ourselves, “Does Charon have anything to do with the way Pluto looks? And, if so, what’s happening?”

I suspect we’ll hear more in the next couple of days about what those processes might be and how they’d work. So, I won’t speculate about that. But, I will say that this world is just delivering more and better surprises each day.  Just to give you an idea, the large dark areas you see on this image about 480 kilometers wide (about 300 miles), and they appear to be much more are more complex than could be make out in earlier images.

The mission scientists are, of course, eagerly dissecting the images, especially looking at the regularly space dark and light spots along the equator, plus the polygon-shaped regions above the equatorial belt. And, they’re asking a lot of questions of their own. Are there plateaus on the surface? Plains? Or, could Pluto be a ball with weird bright and dark variations on an otherwise smooth surface?  Do the circular regions imply impact craters?

I’m not sure all those questions will get answered right away, but they will -— eventually. In the meantime, the mission continues and flyby is just around the corner. Stay tuned!

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