Posted on 07/01/2015 5:53:46 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Youre probably as eager as I am for new images of Pluto and Ceres as both New Horizons and Dawn push ever closer to their respective little worlds. Recent photos, of which there are only a few, reveal some wild new features including what appears to a large crater on Pluto.
In the end, this apparent large impact might only be a contrast effect or worse, an artifact of over-processing, but theres no denying its strong resemblance to foreshortened, shadow-filled craters seen on the Moon and other moons. Its also encouraging that an earlier photo from June 27 shows the same feature. But the crater is just so
big! Its size seems disproportionate to the Plutos globe and recalls Saturns 246-mile-wide moon Mimas with its 81-mile-wide crater Herschel.
(Excerpt) Read more at universetoday.com ...
Pluto with its enigmatic crater photographed on June 27. The apparent row of three depressions near the bottom of the globe are most likely artifacts from processing. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
One for your APOD list perhaps.
New Horizons LORRI gallery page:
https://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons/lorri-gallery
LOL that’s no moon!
Thanks BenLurkin, extra to APoD.
Thanks BenLurkin. Mike Brown (discoverer of some of the TNO/minor planets) at least used to attribute the Pluto/Charon pair to an impact. It's around here somewhere...
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"When we test collision models to predict how Pluto and Charon formed, the models kept producing tiny satellites, much smaller than Charon," added Brown "But we had never seen satellites that small before in the Kuiper belt. But then we found a moon in the Santa system, and then we found another moon circling Xena, and they both look very similar to one another. This leads us to conclude that the largest objects in the Kuiper belt may have been subject to collisions."
Obama took a bite out of it.
“Yummy, dog is good eatin’.”
Did an ancient impact bowl Pluto over?
New Scientist | October 5, 2007 | Maggie McKee
Posted on 10/30/2007 7:29:02 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
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