See Pluto's 45-Miles-Wide, 2-Miles-Deep Grand Canyon

[Buster's Uncle]

See Pluto's 45-Miles-Wide, 2-Miles-Deep Grand Canyon
Popular Mechanics
By John Wenz  1 hour ago



While we've seen plenty of Pluto's southern hemisphere, some of its northern latitudes haven't revealed themselves yet. It turns out it, thanks to enhanced color picture, Pluto hides some of the biggest canyons in the solar system:





The one in yellow is the largest, at 45 miles wide and 2.5 miles deep. The Grand Canyon is 18 miles wide at its widest point and a little more than a mile deep. So this feature easily dwarfs the Grand Canyon. Lowell Regio features other canyons, including two "tributaries" in green that are about six miles wide each.

In addition, the image was released in enhanced color to highlight the yellowed ices. That's likely a caking of sublimated ammonia ices covering the surface of Lowell. The bluish hue may represent newer deposits of ammonia that have yet to be battered by solar radiation. The New Horizons team at NASA says it's found very little evidence of nitrogen ices in the north pole of Pluto, ices that are abundant elsewhere on the planet (especially in Sputnik Planum).

New Horizons is still sending back information from the flyby, but given all the twists and turns in Pluto's geology, it may take years to assemble the whole story of what happened to this tiny, frozen world.


http://news.yahoo.com/see-plutos-45-miles-wide-153556697.html