How Pluto is changing our understanding of the Solar System — BBC Earth has a write up by Marcus Woo on data coming back from the New Horizons mission, currently heading out past Pluto into the Kuiper Belt. This video, posted in 2013 before New Horizons reached Pluto, explains what the belt is and why it is worth studying.
In the months since New Horizons flew past Pluto, the spacecraft has been transmitting data back to earth about what it ‘saw’. Because of the great distances involved, it takes hours for the radio signals to reach Earth. The weakness of the signal limits the rate information can be transmitted. It’s not quite as bad as trying to drain Lake Erie through a soda straw, but it’s close.
...Now, more than a year after New Horizons showed us Pluto in all its detail, the spacecraft has sent back 80% of its data, with the rest coming in October 2016. Scientists are sifting through the torrent of information, piecing together a world of startling variety and complexity.
The BBC article is a summary of what researchers are putting together as the data accumulates and they can start putting the puzzle pieces together. It’s giving them a good look at the outer Solar System for the first time — and it’s turning up quite a few surprises.
..."We knew the atmosphere and surface were coupled and things would be moving around on Pluto timescales," McKinnon says. "But it's another thing altogether to say there are moving glaciers, floating ice mountains, convection, or a vast frozen sea of solid nitrogen. This was stuff that was over the top – people would've laughed at us."
Indeed, New Horizons discovered a surface beyond anyone's imagination. Much of the giant heart that dominates the now-famous photo of Pluto turns out to be an enormous glacier, the biggest in the Solar System. It is a vast chunk of frozen nitrogen creeping across the surface.
Read the whole thing — there’s quite bit more, and more to come as New Horizons encounters other objects in the Kuiper Belt.