Perplexing Pluto: New ‘Snakeskin’ Image and More from New Horizons | Hacker News Reader

Perplexing Pluto: New ‘Snakeskin’ Image and More from New Horizons

nasa.gov

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Don't miss the "high resolution" link:

http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/cro... (8000x8000, 67.5 Mb)

Wow, that's how I imagined Arrakis (Dune) would look. Rich spice fields, open desert, rock outcrops...

This is breathtaking!

Cool!

You can totally see the atmosphere in the top right horizon.

A lot of the big crags throughout the planet look to me like they have to be formed by flowing liquid.

Isn't it just lossy compression related artifacts from the glow ?

I suspect that image was sent back uncompressed.

You can very clearly see (12!) layers of the atmosphere in this photo:

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/pluto-wows-in-spectacular-new-b...

Pluto is a lot more interesting to look at than Mars is. I had expected something in between the Moon and that comet Rosetta is orbiting - lumpy grey rock. Instead I'm getting the sense of some semi-desert planet with a complex weather system.

I wonder if our preconception of celestial bodies as "lumpy grey rocks" is biased by our proximity to a bunch of grey rocks.

Lumpy grey rocks are common in the inner solar system where rocks (Si, Ca, Mg, Fe, Al, etc.) are the only things that remain solid in the long term. It's too hot around here for anything more volatile to last without a strong magnetic field to protect them.

But as you move further away from the Sun, things that we normally don't think of as "rock", such as water and methane, begin to behave like rock. If ice is rock, then water is lava, and methane rain can erode it! So we get a whole bunch of phenomena that are similar to Earth geology and weather, only with different chemicals.

Can someone ELI5 what creates these uh... I guess ridges? Pockets? I highlighted them with red here: http://i.imgur.com/nVCezYA.png

Would these be caused by atmosphere/lack of atmosphere, tectonic plates, "we don't know", nitrogen ice sheets colliding, or... ?

My current pet theory is it is the remnants of a civilization, because it reminds me of major highways (orange lines): http://i.imgur.com/5BsRkAi.png /s

Nobody knows yet. Best conjecture so far is ice sublimation.

Makes me think of mud crack patterns.

These happend when the soil contracts. Maybe it's the same type of phenomena, caused by ice contraction ?

I took their projected image and threw it in my 360x180 pano viewer. It's a little weird seeing it as if you're inside the planet looking out, but it is kind of neat.

This won't work properly on mobile: http://robotrising.org/StratoSphere/index2.html?src=images/p...

Looks like frozen bubbles that popped.

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