I'm going to go out on a limb and say the lack of impact craters indicates that the entire planetary surface sublimates and the planet is slowly evaporating like a giant comet. During perihelion, the planet is "active" and this creates the atmosphere detectable from earth. The tall mountains are areas of greater density that do not dissipate as quickly. Pluto is big enough that its gravity causes a lot of the ejected material to fall back on its surface as snow and move around creating and modifying surface features before eventually disappearing into space.
Anyone getting the questions and answers? I'm at work and can't do audio.
Quote from: JasonAW3 on 07/17/2015 05:18 pmQuote from: Chris Bergin on 07/17/2015 05:13 pmIcy plains of PlutoWhoa! It almost looks as though there is debris around the holes along the ice ridges. If so, it could be an indicator of cryovolcanism!Or wind.Or both!
Quote from: Chris Bergin on 07/17/2015 05:13 pmIcy plains of PlutoWhoa! It almost looks as though there is debris around the holes along the ice ridges. If so, it could be an indicator of cryovolcanism!
Icy plains of Pluto
"Science never sleeps"... What a great line!
Nix satellite portrayed, 2-times better than earth-based resolution.25 miles across.
50 GB of data has been collected.....and yet to collect. Will arrive 2:1 compression. 1GB on the ground so far.
Heh...They had 65GB of flash memory available....didn't even get close to topping it off.
Quote from: Chris Bergin on 07/17/2015 05:32 pm50 GB of data has been collected.....and yet to collect. Will arrive 2:1 compression. 1GB on the ground so far.Quote from: seawolfe on 07/17/2015 05:34 pmHeh...They had 65GB of flash memory available....didn't even get close to topping it off.I think both of these should be "Gb", not "GB". The recorders are 8GB (gigabytes) each (which is 64Gb), so there's no way to store 50GB plus the team has been talking mostly in "gigabits" in the past.So, they probably have 1 gigabit (128MB) downloaded out of 50Gb (6.25GB).