hello and welcome to space and this month were taking you out to the
farthest reaches of our solar system to this place the dwarf planet Pluto it
turns out to be far more weird than anyone ever expected with all kinds of
unexplained phenomena on the surface we sought out some of Europe's finest ice
planet experts to find out more Pluto has been a mystery since it was
discovered in 1930 first called a planet then reclassified as a dwarf planet in
2006 the more we learn the more it captures the imagination of scientists
like esa's Elliot slept and gnash one of the important things you should
understand about Pluto is the real scale of it compared to the rest of the solar
system so you come to the beach to really convey that step
scale and distance so if I draw the Sun as a 30 centimeter circle then we have
to walk about 35 steps this way in order to draw the earth in the same type of
scale
so the Sun is over there 30 centimeters which means that the earth should be
about here about 3mm use something like this if we were to draw Pluto in the
same scale it should be zero point three millimeters and it should be one
kilometer down the beach
now obviously I can't draw something that's point three millimeters so I have
to draw Bluto a bit bigger if this is Pluto then its largest moon is Sharon
which is about half its size the Pluto has four other moons Styx Nix Kerberos
and Hydra so there's a lot going on around the Pluto system it's not just a
cold dead icy Rock humanity had its first close-up view of Pluto in 2015
when NASA's new Horizons probe flew past the dwarf planet and it smooth as it
witnessed was unlike anything we'd ever seen before
scientists working on new horizons like Bernau Schmitz and Tanguy Bertram were
spellbound they were seeing a distant world that didn't resemble the rocky
planets earth or Mars nor the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn Pluto is different
on you I when New Horizons arrived at Pluto we were struck by the topography
why because you've mountains that reach up to four kilometers high and you have
the huge basin which is three kilometers below the average surface height those
are enormous topographical differences for a small body like Pluto instability
in on earth one go to the key consider the six gigabytes of images and
scientific measurement slowly sent back by New Horizons are now filling in the
gaps in our knowledge of Pluto what the team is finding as they dig into that
data is the world dominated by ice then our and Tonchi took us to a frozen lake
near Grenoble and cleared the snow to allow us to compare what we see here on
earth with what has been discovered on Pluto
like Leslie eating less water right here is close to zero degrees it's like in
all the glasses here in the outdoor Kelly although it's relatively soft it
flows and forms glass peers who are pre-dawn it's on Pluto this water is at
minus 230 degrees Celsius and it's as hard as rock
sure so on Pluto its water that forms the mountain ranges in more than yet so
the mountains on Pluto a water right occasionally dappled with patches of
methane frost while the huge heart-shaped glacier on its surface is
made from nitrogen scientists think Pluto has strong seasonal cycles too
which could explain some of the unusual features on its surface adequate that
the Equator is an enigma there are no volatile ices it's just the base of
water ice covered in a kind of soot this black material that's produced by the
photolysis of the ice by UV rays so there's a huge contrast between the dark
zones of the Equator and the bright areas in the north and this gigantic
glacier of nitrogen ice dust besides France
that Glacia known as Sputnik planet is thought to be under a million years old
a remarkably young age by planetary standards
nobody has agreed on an explanation for how it was formed and how its renewed
understanding Pluto can really help us understand the solar system as a whole
so scientists think there's a strong case to go there again
I think it would be fantastic to send a lambda to really understand first of all
the structures and the mineralogy up close but also to observe it over a
longer time period because we've only seen Pluto and very you know an instant
of its orbit and so there might the seasonal changes might be very dynamic
if we could watch it for a whole year
okay when you're a strange place and so you really want to stimulate this world
do experiments try to understand how it works because there's a kind of climate
there's an atmosphere on Pluto there are Isis but it's not at all like Earth
paneer and planet was nobody imagined we'd find such a dynamic planet so far
from the Sun and were left with a lot more questions but a space mission that
poses more questions than it answers Quran is a successful miss lacy just a
few years ago Pluto and its moons were nothing but a few pixels in our
telescopes mysterious docks in the asteroid belt beyond Neptune now we know
it better and were curious to know more
away from Pluto now and to our new miniseries legends of space throughout
2017 were celebrating 60 years since Sputnik by looking at some of the
greatest moments in space exploration and this month we looked at April 1961
when Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space
which last time when I just got you got you
Rodolphe cap I'm always impressed when I look at the
latter giggling how harder laughs you had a head and it came from a very
modest family the young man he was 27 years of age when he did to his flight
on the 12th of April 1961 it is they not know possession disease quítate it was
an extremely risky operation and that's what we loved about his background
opinion I was young just 24 and it seemed extraordinary the and it was
Jagga he stands very high in the mind of astronauts and cosmonauts and in the
International Space Station you have a portrait of Gagarin who is there and
looking at all of the occupants of Isis
Dulli the realty the success and then Gagarin's charisma he was likable he was
young he was the son of a potato farmer so he wasn't perfect for Khrushchev it
was a real demonstration of what a Soviet astronauts can be because with it
and that's what also muted
that's all for now you can watch other episodes of legends of space and keep up
to date with other news from the universe on our website on euronews calm