A region of Pluto’s icy mountains now called Norgay Montes after Tenzing Norgay (Pic: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI)
In a fine and thoughtful gesture NASA’s New Horizons team has named a range of mountains on Pluto after Tenzing Norgay. Called Norgay Montes, the icy mountains discovered on Pluto by New Horizons during its July 14 flyby is a remarkable tribute to the Nepalese mountaineer who along with Edmund Hillary scaled Mount Everest on May 29, 1953. They were the first humans to do so.
Watching a news briefing yesterday by the New Horizons team yesterday it was announced that the mountains, some of which rise to 11,000 feet, have been named in memory of Norgay, which incidentally means fortunate. That prompted me to check a tangential detail. I had suspected that the base camp at Mount Everest was much higher than the total height of Norgay Montes. It indeed is. The base camp on the Nepal side is 17,598 feet while the one on the Tibet side is 16,900. Norgay would have been amused to note that the summit on Pluto is just 11,000 feet. But then at 2,368km diameter Pluto is one sixth Earth’s size.
A body in the solar system, or for that matter anywhere in the universe, being named after someone has no practical value. But then the idea is to immortalize high achievers on Earth by naming things after them beyond our planet. For those of you who care to know a little more about this great mountaineer check this out.
New Horizons has already traveled over three million miles from Pluto and is headed beyond the Kuiper Belt. It will eventually end up in interstellar space like Voyager 1 and 2.
In terms of what the New Horizons has found from early data is this according to an official release:
“In the latest data from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, a new close-up image of Pluto reveals a vast, craterless plain that appears to be no more than 100 million years old, and is possibly still being shaped by geologic processes. This frozen region is north of Pluto’s icy mountains, in the center-left of the heart feature, informally named “Tombaugh Regio” (Tombaugh Region) after Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930.
“This terrain is not easy to explain,” said Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team (GGI) at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. “The discovery of vast, craterless, very young plains on Pluto exceeds all pre-flyby expectations.”
This fascinating icy plains region -- resembling frozen mud cracks on Earth -- has been informally named “Sputnik Planum” (Sputnik Plain) after the Earth’s first artificial satellite. It has a broken surface of irregularly-shaped segments, roughly 12 miles (20 kilometers) across, bordered by what appear to be shallow troughs. Some of these troughs have darker material within them, while others are traced by clumps of hills that appear to rise above the surrounding terrain. Elsewhere, the surface appears to be etched by fields of small pits that may have formed by a process called sublimation, in which ice turns directly from solid to gas, just as dry ice does on Earth.”
As for Nepal, it has something to celebrate.
