A new study led by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) provides evidence that liquid nitrogen is rising to Pluto’s surface through cracks in the northern edge of the Sputnik Planitia, part of the massive heart-shaped glacier on the dwarf planet’s surface.
A new study led by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) provides evidence that liquid nitrogen is rising to Pluto’s surface through cracks in the northern edge of the Sputnik Planitia, part of the massive heart-shaped glacier on the dwarf planet’s surface. This is the first evidence of liquid recently flowing on Pluto. The study is based on data from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft and is led by SwRI Associate Vice President Dr. Alan Stern, the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission.
“Pluto never stops surprising us,” Lead Author Stern said, “and this new result certainly does that. In addition to suggesting that liquids have recently expressed themselves on Pluto’s surface, it also suggests a new kind of time-variable feature on Pluto.”
The Sputnik Planitia is a vast, frozen nitrogen glacier on Pluto, larger than Texas and Oklahoma combined. In 2015 and 2016, New Horizons images of the northernmost portions of this region revealed city-sized geologic convection cells on Sputnik Planitia separated by thin, dark linear and more diffuse, dark features. New analyses now indicate that these dark, linear and diffuse features appear to be occasionally and temporarily wetted, perhaps from time to time, by a liquid—most likely liquid nitrogen. This result has been published in the peer-reviewed Planetary Science Journal.
Read More: Southwest Research Institute
Image: A new study led by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) posits that liquid nitrogen is rising to Pluto’s surface through cracks in the northern edge of the Sputnik Planitia, part of the massive heart-shaped glacier on the dwarf planet’s surface. This is the first evidence of liquid flowing currently on Pluto. For scale, Pluto is about 3/4ths as wide as the continental United States. (Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Southwest Research Institute)
