Known for its strange characteristics, including a giant "bite mark" and ice volcanoes, Pluto continues to surprise as NASA's New Horizons brings back more and more data and images of the planet. Now, an icy "spider" can be added to the list, as seen in a new photo released by NASA.
The image shows strange, reddish leg-like tendrils sprawling across Pluto's surface, and their source appears to be just a single location. The photo was snapped by New Horizons on July 14, 2015, but the picture was only released by NASA on Thursday.
The "legs" are surface fractures, with the longest one - referred to as "Sleipnir Fossa" after the eight-legged horse in Norse mythology - measuring 360 miles long. NASA believes that they were created by "a focused source of stress in the crust under the point where the fractures converge - for example, due to material welling up from under the surface."
"Oh, what a tangled web Pluto's geology weaves," said Oliver White, a member of the New Horizons geology team. "The pattern these fractures form is like nothing else we've seen in the outer solar system, and shows once again that anywhere we look on Pluto, we see something different."
The pattern is much different from other fractures seen on Pluto, which typically run parallel to one another in long stretches. These parallel marks are likely caused by the global-scale extension of Pluto's crust, according to researchers.
The photo of Pluto's spider was taken using New Horizons' Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) at a range of approximately 21,100 miles from Pluto. Its image resolution is approximately 2,230 feet per pixil.
NASA's New Horizons journey began back in 2006, and the agency is currently considering extending the mission in order to bring the spacecraft deeper into the Kuiper Belt in order to explore the other icy objects that inhabit the region.
Whether the mission is extended or not, after it ends, a groups of scientists, artists, engineers and more are preparing to place a message from Earth on the New Horizons spacecraft.
"When New Horizons gets past Pluto, [and] has done all its data and is going on the slow boat to the heliopause [the boundary between the solar system and interstellar space], then it might be possible to just reprogram about 100 megabytes of its memory and upload a new sights and sounds of Earth that are not created by a small group of scientists but, in fact, are globally crowdsourced," said Jill Tarter, co-founder of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute.
