Rediscovering Pluto

Initial images and data from the NASA spacecraft New Horizons recent rendezvous with Pluto point to a surprisingly craterless mosaic of relatively ancient regions and very young places on the dwarf planet.

- T.V. Venkateswaran

REMINISCENT of the famous Raja Ravi Verma painting in which Shakuntala while pretending to remove a thorn from her foot is surreptitiously looking at her lover Dushyantha, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) New Horizons spacecraft took a last peek at Pluto from a distance of 5.7 million kilometres in the wee hours of July 19 and brought to closure a week full of anticipation and excitement.

New Horizons, launched about nine and a half years ago, made its closest approach of Pluto on July 14 while cruising at a record speed of 58,500 kmph after travelling about five billion kilometres. At the time of the closest approach, 17:19 hrs IST (11:49 UTC [Coordinated Universal Time]), as the spacecraft passed 12,500 km above the surface of Pluto, a set of seven scientific instruments aboard the craft hungrily gathered data on the faraway world of Pluto and its five known moons.

This was the first ever foray by any space mission into the Kuiper Belt, the so-called “third region” beyond the terrestrial inner planets and the gaseous outer planets, swarming with teeny-weeny icy objects. New Horizons has indeed taken a cosmic step and as data from it, with tantalising images and surprising implications about Pluto and its five moons, begin to trickle in, our understanding of the weird world is all set to change radically. As one blogger opined, it is time to tear and throw away chapters on Pluto from every book that has ever been published. The world that the New Horizons mission paints is not at the perspective we had until now. We had known all along that Pluto was weird, but it is weirder than we imagined.

AN ODD BALL