By Gabby Shacknai
After nine and a half years and three billion miles of travel, NASA’s New Horizons space probe
finally accomplished its mission
, zipping past Pluto and its three moons to snap photos and gather data.
As speculated, the photos
show icy mountains
as high as 11,000 feet — that’s around the average size of most mountains in the Rockies — and surprisingly not a sole impact crater, indicating that Pluto is actually one of the youngest planet surfaces ever studied.
“Just having one image of just one percent of (Pluto’s surface) and finding mountain ranges like the Rockies is balloon popping,” said Alan Stern, the principal investigator for the mission.
NASA zoomed in on Pluto’s heart-shaped region, now called Tombaugh Regio after Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered the planet in 1930, during a live press conference. The images featured a 150 mile area of icy bedrock and mountains.
More than three billion miles away from Earth, Pluto was discovered a mere 85 years ago from an observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz. It was known as the ninth planet in our solar system until its demotion to dwarf planet status in August 2006.
Assuming all continues to go well, NASA will aim New Horizons towards another Kaiper Belt object in 2019, but for the time being, all eyes are focused on Pluto and the close of an era of mystery surrounding it.
"People will look back on this time from the 60s to 2015 in future centuries, I think, and say, 'That is when the solar system was first explored,'" Stern said.
Warm up questions
-
Is Pluto a planet?
-
What is known about Pluto?
-
What is the job of a space probe?
Critical thinking questions
-
Do you think people will look back on the New Horizons mission as a crucial moment in expanding our knowledge about outer space?
-
What surprised you most about the information sent back about Pluto?
-
Why are missions like New Horizons important to scientific discovery?
-
Do you think the findings mean Pluto should be reinstated as an actual planet?
