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Pluto, the ninth non-planet of the Sun, is a puzzle that astronomers continue to collect
The Last Piece – an officially validated world map and topographic maps of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon – a was published this week
The New Horizons team published his findings and detailed the process of their creation in two research articles published by the newspaper Icarus .
Researchers, led by senior USRA scientists scientist Paul Schenk of the Lunar and Planetary Institute, recorded and badembled mosaics with meticulous precision.
(Imagine sitting on a computer screen, trying to perfectly align surface features like craters and mountains.)
were built for two years using images of the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) and the Visible Multispectral Imaging Camera (MVIC).
"It was one of the most complex but most exciting planetary mapping projects that I had the pleasure of participating in," Mr. Schenk said in a statement. Once new images were falling, something new was revealed. "
The New Horizons interplanetary spacecraft was launched in 2006 with the primary mission of making an overview of Pluto before studying 39, other Kuiper belt objects since it is the 2015 encounter with the dwarf planet, the craft slowly cast data onto the Earth.
Preliminary maps of Pluto and Charon have These final cartographic and topographical versions, "validated", according to the USRA, represent the best current understanding of cosmic bodies.
These maps show a variety of reliefs on both orbs, confirming the most high mountains conn on Pluto under the name of Tenzing. "The degree of topographic relief of Pluto in the hemisphere that we have explored with New Horizons is truly incredible," says Alan Stern, senior mission scientist at the Southwest Research Institute. I said. "I can not wait to see the other side of Pluto revealed in detail by a future mission to orbit the planet."
The Charon maps, on the other hand, show deep depressions of 8.7 miles near the North Pole. "These and other features make Charon the most robust medium-sized glacial satellite except Iapetus, the high-contrast Saturn satellite," said Ross Beyer, a researcher at the SETI Institute in California. who participated in the mapping
. The global maps of Pluto and Charon images and topographies have been archived in the Planetary Data System and will be available to the scientific community and the public
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