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New Horizons
Dec 4, 2015
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PLUTO'S LAYERED CRATERS AND ICY PLAINS



This highest-resolution image from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft reveals new
details of Pluto’s rugged, icy cratered plains. Notice the layering in the
interior walls of many craters (the large crater at upper right is a good
example). Layers in geology usually mean an important change in composition or
event, but at the moment New Horizons team members do not know if they are
seeing local, regional or global layering. The darker crater in the lower center
is apparently younger than the others, because dark material ejected from within
– its “ejecta blanket” – has not been erased and can still be made out. The
origin of the many dark linear features trending roughly vertically in the
bottom half of the image is under debate, but may be tectonic. Most of the
craters seen here lie within the 155-mile (250-kilometer)-wide Burney Basin,
whose outer rim or ring forms the line of hills or low mountains at bottom. The
basin is informally named after Venetia Burney, the English schoolgirl who first
proposed the name “Pluto” for the newly discovered planet in 1930. The top of
the image is to Pluto’s northwest.

Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Last Updated: Aug 7, 2017
Editor: Tricia Talbert


TAGS:  DWARF PLANETS, NEW HORIZONS, PLUTO, SOLAR SYSTEM,


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