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More of my astronomical and space travel art can be seen in my DA "Space Art" gallery:
lexlothor.deviantart.com/galle…
NASA continues to release new images from the New Horizons encounter with Pluto in the summer of 2015. It will take many months for the recorded images that were captured in a few short hours to be played back. The space probe has limited power and bandwidth. An image released in September 2015 is so far the most jaw dropping picture yet to be seen from the flyby. It is a close up of the limb of Pluto looking backward toward the sun. The thon but deep atmosphere of Pluto is backlit. I have drawn this picture from memory so I keep the essentials without going into minutia on such a small scale piece of paper. I took the liberty of placing Pluto's large moon Charon in this rendering.
It is my first blush observation that Pluto possesses the tallest mountains in proportion to its circumference of any object yet visited in the Solar System. These are to the scale of Pluto what the Fist of God is to Larry Niven's fictional Ring World. Earth could never have mountains so high in proportion to its radius. Silicate rock just can't be piled up that high without collapsing uner its own weight or flowing plastically in the manner of Mons Olympus on Mars.
My own crazy ass impression of these mountains is that they represent no form of tectonic or volcanic mountain building science has ever before witnessed. The entire surface of Pluto is glazed in ice plains or in hilly terrain that looks exactly like freezer burn, the frost that grows on the inside of a refrigerator freezer due to the crystallization of water vapor from the outside air.
I think that the hills and mountains of Pluto did not rise up from below. They appear to have accumulated from above! They grew like stalagmites or snowflakes.
Pluto has an orbital period that is measured not in years but in centuries. It arrived at its present orbital inclination and eccentricity long after it formed closer to the gas giants of the Solar System. Its orbit is so eccentric that for several decades every orbit it passes inside the orbit of Neptune. When this happens gases such a nitrogen that have frozen out on it surface during apohelion ablate during perihelion. NASA missed a golden opportunity to visit Pluto at perihelion during the 1980's. Voyager 1 could have been sent on a trajectory to Pluto after its Saturn encounter in 1980. Instead Voyager 1 was sent past Saturn's moon Titan where it saw nothing beneath its atmospheric haze. I had to wait half my life span to finally see Pluto. Ironically, had Voyager seen these wonders of Pluto, a complete world with its own atmosphere and retinue of moons, no member of the IAU would have ever had the gall to demote it from the status of a planet.
The New Horizons probe was dispatched to Pluto at the last possible time interval in which it could observe Pluto's atmosphere before it freezes out again. It was worth the trip.
I am putting forth my own notion that whatever topographical highs and lows that existed on Pluto prior to its expulsion from the main Solar System 4 billion years ago became accentuated once every orbit due to the freeze thaw cycle of its atmosphere.
Here is my hypothesis:
After Pluto's closest approach the sun volatile constituents of its atmosphere begin the condense out as frost in the order of each gas or compound's freezing point. This freezing occurs differentially due to altitude. Higher topographic features would frost over sooner than lower ones given the same amount of exposure to sunlight. This means that year after Plutonian year, the high points would build up higher and higher. The effect of frost accumulation on mountain tops would have been negligible at first, but it would have become a positively reinforcing feedback loop that gradually accelerated over the passage of something like 50 million orbits around the sun. This effect might have reached equilibrium epochs ago, or the mountains of Pluto may still be growing.
art & text (c) John P. Alexander
2.5" x 3.5" art card rendered in Prismacolor pencils, Tombow markers & acrylics
lexlothor.deviantart.com/galle…
NASA continues to release new images from the New Horizons encounter with Pluto in the summer of 2015. It will take many months for the recorded images that were captured in a few short hours to be played back. The space probe has limited power and bandwidth. An image released in September 2015 is so far the most jaw dropping picture yet to be seen from the flyby. It is a close up of the limb of Pluto looking backward toward the sun. The thon but deep atmosphere of Pluto is backlit. I have drawn this picture from memory so I keep the essentials without going into minutia on such a small scale piece of paper. I took the liberty of placing Pluto's large moon Charon in this rendering.
It is my first blush observation that Pluto possesses the tallest mountains in proportion to its circumference of any object yet visited in the Solar System. These are to the scale of Pluto what the Fist of God is to Larry Niven's fictional Ring World. Earth could never have mountains so high in proportion to its radius. Silicate rock just can't be piled up that high without collapsing uner its own weight or flowing plastically in the manner of Mons Olympus on Mars.
My own crazy ass impression of these mountains is that they represent no form of tectonic or volcanic mountain building science has ever before witnessed. The entire surface of Pluto is glazed in ice plains or in hilly terrain that looks exactly like freezer burn, the frost that grows on the inside of a refrigerator freezer due to the crystallization of water vapor from the outside air.
I think that the hills and mountains of Pluto did not rise up from below. They appear to have accumulated from above! They grew like stalagmites or snowflakes.
Pluto has an orbital period that is measured not in years but in centuries. It arrived at its present orbital inclination and eccentricity long after it formed closer to the gas giants of the Solar System. Its orbit is so eccentric that for several decades every orbit it passes inside the orbit of Neptune. When this happens gases such a nitrogen that have frozen out on it surface during apohelion ablate during perihelion. NASA missed a golden opportunity to visit Pluto at perihelion during the 1980's. Voyager 1 could have been sent on a trajectory to Pluto after its Saturn encounter in 1980. Instead Voyager 1 was sent past Saturn's moon Titan where it saw nothing beneath its atmospheric haze. I had to wait half my life span to finally see Pluto. Ironically, had Voyager seen these wonders of Pluto, a complete world with its own atmosphere and retinue of moons, no member of the IAU would have ever had the gall to demote it from the status of a planet.
The New Horizons probe was dispatched to Pluto at the last possible time interval in which it could observe Pluto's atmosphere before it freezes out again. It was worth the trip.
I am putting forth my own notion that whatever topographical highs and lows that existed on Pluto prior to its expulsion from the main Solar System 4 billion years ago became accentuated once every orbit due to the freeze thaw cycle of its atmosphere.
Here is my hypothesis:
After Pluto's closest approach the sun volatile constituents of its atmosphere begin the condense out as frost in the order of each gas or compound's freezing point. This freezing occurs differentially due to altitude. Higher topographic features would frost over sooner than lower ones given the same amount of exposure to sunlight. This means that year after Plutonian year, the high points would build up higher and higher. The effect of frost accumulation on mountain tops would have been negligible at first, but it would have become a positively reinforcing feedback loop that gradually accelerated over the passage of something like 50 million orbits around the sun. This effect might have reached equilibrium epochs ago, or the mountains of Pluto may still be growing.
art & text (c) John P. Alexander
2.5" x 3.5" art card rendered in Prismacolor pencils, Tombow markers & acrylics
Image size
2769x1961px 1.8 MB
© 2015 - 2024 LEXLOTHOR
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Good job, Sir. 