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back to article PEAK PLUTO: Stunning mountain ridge snapped by New Horizons craft

Photographs of alien mountain ranges, weird splotches and more are still coming in from the New Horizons space probe as it hurtles beyond the orbit of Pluto: the craft is slowly beaming back oodles of data gathered during its flyby of the dwarf iceworld. For starters, Pluto's moon Nix features what the space agency is calling …

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  1. Russell Hancock

    Science is amazing

    I am loving these pictures.... from millions of miles away.... of another planet...

    I really wish the UK had a space agency so I could have gone into something like this - just imagine how stressful and then relieving the days up to arrival were!

    Keep it up, please, please keep it up...

    10 0 Reply
    1. David Knapman
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      Re: Science is amazing

      Your wish is hereby granted - https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/uk-space-agency

      Of course, you probably mean a space agency that does missions like this, rather than them just existing.

      12 0 Reply
    2. Anonymous Blowhard
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      Re: Science is amazing

      There are plenty of UK citizens working for/with NASA and ESA (Rosetta anyone?) so would-be British space explorers have plenty of opportunities without having to wait for a UK Government to realise that there's something beyond Westminster and the Square Mile.

      7 0 Reply
    3. Gene Cash Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Science is amazing

      Better than that, it's nearly 4 BILLION miles away, which is a "far piece"

      http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html

      (Found that link in a BBC article, by the way)

      1 0 Reply
  2. Richard 81

    Giant jelly bean?

    Looks like a Vermicious Knid to me.

    6 0 Reply
    1. Mark 85
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      Re: Giant jelly bean?

      It possibly is a giant Jelly Belly jelly bean. Resembles the strawberry smoothie ones.

      0 0 Reply
  3. Winkypop Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    However

    No celestial teapot.

    1 0 Reply
    1. Clive Galway
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      Re: However

      Have faith, brother, it's there.

      Wotan told me so in a dream.

      5 0 Reply
  4. TimR

    More Plutonian mountains

    Does this remind anyone else of Arctic pack ice by a rocky shore?

    5 0 Reply
    1. 0laf
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      Re: More Plutonian mountains

      Yes. Icebergs in frozen sea ice was my thought

      1 0 Reply
      1. Tom 7
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        Re: More Plutonian mountains

        I'm inclined to think the relatively flat bit is an impact crater - there appears to be its ejecta to the 'east' and 'south' and I'm wondering if the mountains are in fact large lumps of ice that were deposited by a kind of tidal wave that was washed out of the crater.

        I'm guessing whatever hit it came in relatively slowly so it was all a mud bath splash rather than lots of vaporization.

        0 0 Reply
    2. Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge
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      Re: More Plutonian mountains

      Or liquid beneath the surface that pushes up as it freezes. (Same effect with rust on steel; you get lumps because rust has a greater volume.) Anyway, with perihelion at 30AU and aphelion at 49AU it's plausible something is melting and refreezing.

      1 0 Reply
  5. tempemeaty

    Giant Kuiper Belt tick...on pluto

    Now that it's full, it's fallen off.

    3 0 Reply
  6. Nick Davey

    Incredible

    This is the kind of science that truly excites me, seeing those amazing pictures of alien worlds. Then engineering that goes into these successful missions of the past year (even if things took a lot longer to get to where they were going) is a credit to the skill and determination of the people working on these projects. These guys do incredible work and should be justly recognised for their efforts.

    7 0 Reply
  7. Ermintrude

    Yes it looks like something other than water is going through a melt/freeze cycle. We are used to seeing this with water/ice on Earth, but that has the unusual property of ice being less dense than water. Most materials it is the other way around, so you could expect the result to look strange to our eyes. Also most materials would not stay liquid very long during the thaw, if at all.

    1 0 Reply
    1. Loyal Commenter Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Do we even know what the 'dark' and 'light' materials are made of? presumably there's some sort of spectrographic instruments on board to measure the chemical composition? Has this been done and we're just waiting on the data?

      1 0 Reply
    2. cmannett85
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      " it looks like something other than water is going through a melt/freeze cycle"

      It's nitrogen and methane: http://astronomynow.com/2015/07/16/pluto-the-ice-plot-thickens/

      1 0 Reply
  8. squigbobble

    Cryovulcanism

    Is my vote for the mountains on Pluto.

    0 0 Reply
    1. Loyal Commenter Silver badge
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      Re: Cryovulcanism

      I think they should be named The Mountains of Madness, after all we have apparently already decided to refer to a region on Pluto as 'Cthulhu', what could possibly go wrong?

      2 0 Reply
      1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
        Reply Icon
        Alien

        Re: Cryovulcanism

        Yep, GIGANTIC, CHTONIC AND CURIOUSLY GEOMETRIC GEOLOGICAL FORMATIONS CONFUSINGLY SEEN BY THE WANING LIGHT OF A SETTING SUN WHILE WE SPEED BY?

        TEKELI-LI, I SAY!

        1 0 Reply
      2. Roj Blake Silver badge
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        Re: Cryovulcanism

        The whole planet should be renamed as Yuggoth.

        1 0 Reply
        1. Bernard M. Orwell
          Reply Icon
          Coat

          Re: Cryovulcanism

          Whoever did so would be a fun guy.

          0 0 Reply
  9. tempemeaty
    Pint

    The mountains? Hmmmm....

    Supermans' real "Fortress of Solitude".

    0 0 Reply

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