Tag: Pluto

Pluto May Have Formed from 1 Billion Comets

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This view of Pluto’s Sputnik Planitia nitrogen-ice plain was captured by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft during its flyby of the dwarf planet in July 2015.

At its heart, Pluto may be a gigantic comet.

Researchers have come up with a new theory about the dwarf planet’s origins after taking a close look at Sputnik Planitia, the vast nitrogen-ice glacier that constitutes the left lobe of Pluto’s famous “heart” feature.

“We found an intriguing consistency between the estimated amount of nitrogen inside the glacier and the amount that would be expected if Pluto was formed by the agglomeration of roughly a billion comets or other Kuiper Belt objects similar in chemical composition to 67P, the comet explored by Rosetta,” Chris Glein, a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio, said in a statement.

The European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission orbited Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko from 2014 through 2016. The orbiting mothership also dropped a lander named Philae onto the icy body, pulling off the first-ever soft touchdown on a comet’s surface. (The Kuiper Belt is the ring of frigid objects beyond Neptune’s orbit; Pluto is the belt’s largest resident.)

Glein and his SwRI colleague Hunter Waite devised the new Pluto-formation scenario after analyzing data from Rosetta and NASA’s New Horizons mission, which flew by Pluto in July 2015.

The scientists also made some inferences about the dwarf planet’s evolution in their new study, which was published online Wednesday (May 23) in the journal Icarus.

“Our research suggests that Pluto’s initial chemical makeup, inherited from cometary building blocks, was chemically modified by liquid water, perhaps even in a subsurface ocean,” Glein said.

Glein and Waite aren’t claiming to have nailed down Pluto’s origin definitively; a “solar model,” in which the dwarf planet coalesced from cold ices with a chemical composition closer to that of the sun, also remains in play, the duo said.

“This research builds upon the fantastic successes of the New Horizons and Rosetta missions to expand our understanding of the origin and evolution of Pluto,” Glein said.

“Using chemistry as a detective’s tool, we are able to trace certain features we see on Pluto today to formation processes from long ago,” he added. “This leads to a new appreciation of the richness of Pluto’s ‘life story,’ which we are only starting to grasp.”

Rosetta’s mission ended in September 2016, when the probe’s handlers steered it to an intentional crash-landing on 67P’s surface. New Horizons’ work, however, is far from done. The NASA spacecraft is speeding toward a flyby of a small Kuiper Belt object known officially as 2014 MU69 (and unofficially as Ultima Thule). This close encounter, which will occur on Jan. 1, 2019, about 1 billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto’s orbit, is the centerpiece of New Horizons’ extended mission.

https://www.space.com/40687-pluto-formation-1-billion-comets.html

Pluto has ‘floating hills,’ NASA says

On By A.P.In PlutoLeave a comment

By Jareen Imam

Last Thursday, NASA released a photo of what they are calling Pluto’s “floating hills.” The images were captured by New Horizons spacecraft during its historic 2015 fly by.

The hill clusters lie in a vast ice plain inside the dwarf planet’s “heart” region. It’s believed that the frozen formations stretch for miles. Experts at NASA theorize that the mysterious floating hills are fragments of water ice that resemble giant glaciers, similar to the icebergs we see on Earth.

Since water ice is lighter than nitrogen ice, the hills are floating above a sea of nitrogen. These huge chucks of water ice move much like the icebergs that float in Earth’s Arctic Ocean, NASA scientists said in a statement.

It’s likely that the floating hills are fragmented water ice that have broken away from the rugged uplands and are gliding towards the Sputnik Planum.

This photo comes after NASA announced in January that the dwarf planet is covered with way more water ice than the American space agency initially expected. The water ice discovery came after NASA stitched together two infrared images taken by New Horizons.

Since it’s initial flyby, the images captured by New Horizons continue to reveal new characteristics about the dwarf planet.

The floating hills are joining Pluto’s already fascinating geographic activity from its towering ice mountains to its potential ice volcanoes.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/06/us/pluto-floating-hills-irpt/index.html