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Space & Planetary Science

Pluto Reveals Its Frozen Plains and Preliminary Atmosphere Details

By Marc Boucher
NASA Watch
July 17, 2015
Filed under ,
Pluto Reveals Its Frozen Plains and Preliminary Atmosphere Details

NASA’s New Horizons Discovers Frozen Plains in the Heart of Pluto’s Heart
“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.”

Pluto Wags its Tail: New Horizons Discovers a Cold, Dense Region of Atmospheric Ions Behind Pluto
New Horizons Reveals Pluto’s Extended Atmosphere

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12 responses to “Pluto Reveals Its Frozen Plains and Preliminary Atmosphere Details”

  1. Yale S says:
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    Altho Pluto and Charon are now synchronously linked, that would not have always been the case. There may be some serious residual heat (and liquid sub-surface ocean>) left from earlier tidal stresses.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      I’ve been thinking about that, Yale. We know how big those bodies are now (both mass and girth). Couldn’t a really smart person calculate how long it would take for stored tidal-energy to dissipate?

  2. richard_schumacher says:
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    Could the Pluto system be quite young?

    • Yale S says:
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      That’s what I was thinking. Either a capture fairly recently last <1 billion years,, or more likely a massive collision leaving 2 major bodies and a messy cloud of debris including the minor moons.

      In the first case (of the capture), tidal forces would provide the melting heat. In the latter case of a collision, the melting may simply reflect an actual young body made from the liquefied remnants of the crash, like the Earth-Moon almost 4 bill years ago.

    • Paul451 says:
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      That’s still pretty radical. All the big impacts (enough to create Charon) seemed to happen in first billion years of the formation of the solar system. That there planetesimal-scale stuff still chaotically drifting around as recent as, say, half a billion years ago would be pretty revolutionary.

  3. Robert van de Walle says:
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    How firm is the theory that impact rates are constant across the radius of the solar system?

    • Ben Russell-Gough says:
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      I’m no expert personally but those who are claim that impact rates should be higher in the outer solar system.

      I’m wondering if Pluto being out-of-ecliptic so long might have something to do with it.

      • Michael Spencer says:
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        The density of objects being much higher stands to reason they would bump into one anther, no?

    • fcrary says:
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      Impact rates most definitely vary across the solar system. But the size distribution of impactors doesn’t vary (much) so you can scale from the number of observed KBOs down to the abundance of 1 km and smaller impactors. That is uncertain, but probably good to an order of magnitude.

  4. Daniel Woodard says:
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    Pluto’s eccentric orbit may lead to some changes due to solar heating and cooling.

    • PsiSquared says:
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      Using an approximation for calculating luminous power incident on surface (power=solar luminance*area of solar disc*area Pluto disc/distance^2), the luminous power incident on Pluto at perihelion is about 2.7 times that when Pluto is at aphelion. That of course doesn’t take into account many other things that would increase or decrease heating of Pluto’s surface.

  5. hikingmike says:
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    Heck yeah, this is fun stuff!