Recent blogs and Web postings are claiming that an asteroid will impact Earth, sometime between 15 September and 28 September 2015. On one of those dates, as rumours go, there will be an impact – “evidently” near Puerto Rico – causing destruction to the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the US and Mexico, as well as Central and South America. NASA has published some facts to debunk the rumours.
Icy mountains on Pluto and a new, crisp view of its largest moon, Charon, are among the several discoveries announced by NASA’s New Horizons team, just one day after the spacecraft’s first-ever Pluto flyby. A new close-up image of an equatorial region near the base of Pluto’s bright heart-shaped feature shows a mountain range with peaks jutting as high as 3 500m above the surface of the icy body. The mountains on Pluto likely formed no more than 100-million years ago – mere youngsters in a 4,56-billion-year-old solar system. This suggests the close-up region, which covers about 1% of Pluto’s surface, may still be geologically active today. Unlike the icy moons of giant planets, Pluto cannot be heated by gravitational interactions with a much larger planetary body. Some other process must be generating the mountainous landscape.
In just less than one month, the New Horizons spacecraft will make its closest approach to the dwarf planet Pluto, 7,5-billion kilometres from Earth. New Horizons will also venture into the Kuiper Belt, a relic of solar system formation. New Horizons launched on 19 January 2006; it swung past Jupiter for a gravity boost and scientific studies in February 2007, and is conducting a six-month-long reconnaissance flyby study of Pluto and its moons that started in early 2015. The closest approach to Pluto will occur on 14 July 2015, after which it could head farther into the Kuiper Belt to examine one or two of the ancient, icy mini-worlds in that vast region, at least 1-billion miles beyond Neptune’s orbit.