NEW YORK – New pictures relayed by the first spacecraft to visit distant Pluto show odd polygon-shaped features and smooth hills in an crater-free plain, indications that the icy world is geologically active, New Horizons scientists said. “We had no idea that Pluto would have a geologically young surface,” said lead researcher Alan Stern, with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “It's a wonderful surprise.” The goal of the $720 million New Horizons mission is to map the surfaces of Pluto and its primary moon Charon, assess what materials they contain and study Pluto's atmosphere. Launched in 2006, the spacecraft traveled 4.88 billion kilometers to fly through the Pluto system last week. About 1 percent of the 50 gigabytes of data recorded in the 10 days leading up to the close encounter with Pluto has been relayed back to Earth. Still, the early results show that frozen Pluto, where surface temperatures reach 400 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (minus 240 Celsius), is challenging theories about how icy bodies can generate heat to reshape their surface features. For example, a bright heart-shaped region near Pluto's equator has no impact craters, indicating a surface that is less than about 100 million years old, a relative blink in geologic time. “It's possibly still being shaped this day by geological processes. Those could be only a week old, for all we know,” geologist Jeffrey Moore, with NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, told reporters on a conference call. – Reuters
