Station New Horizons took images of Pluto, on which scientists noticed a corroded area.
NASA presented the image of the region on the surface of Pluto, which received the informal name “Venus fly trap land”.
The picture was published on the official website of NASA. The bright area consists of plains, divided into blocks by a network of dark valleys with a width of 3 to 4 kilometers. The region is also dotted with craters, the diameter of which is about 25 kilometers, which suggests that it was formed in the early history of Pluto. Such landscape is not found anywhere, not Pluto. The only known researchers an example of such surface is within the labyrinthus on Mars.
New Horizons — automatic interplanetary station NASA, launched in the framework of the “New frontier” (New Frontiers) and intended to study Pluto and its natural satellite Charon.
The launch was made on 19 January 2006, with a span of Jupiter (gravity and maneuver into its field of gravitation) in 2007, and Pluto in 2015. After a flyby of Pluto, the device may examine one of the objects of the Kuiper belt. Full mission New Horizons is designed for 15-17 years.
Interplanetary station New Horizons left Earth’s neighborhood with the largest of all spacecrafts speed. At the moment the engine shuts down it amounted to 16.26 km/s (relative to Earth). Heliocentric speed was 45 km/s, which would allow the station’s New Horizons to leave the Solar system even without a gravity assist about Jupiter.
Station New Horizons is nearing Pluto (12.5 thousand km) July 14, 2015 at 14:50 Moscow time. The spacecraft within 30 minutes had to spend about 150 scientific measurements. However, there was a probability of 0.01% that New Horizons can be lost due to collision with particles of cosmic dust and larger bodies. After making “the call” from aboard the international space station, scientists were convinced in the successful fulfilment of its primary mission.
It is expected that in 2019, the plant will reach the planetoid 2014 MU69 object in the Kuiper belt, is selected as a possible new target for New Horizons.
