#sputnik planitia

[blasteffect]

Pluto's Hillary Mountains

It took 9 years and 3 billion miles for NASA's New Horizons spacecraft to finally capture this view.

The Hillary Mountains, towering mountains of water ice, rising up to 3,500 meters, on the edge of a huge frozen nitrogen plain called Sputnik Planitia.

Courtesy: Nasa

[bolaneno]

Plutonian highlands of Safronov Regio (aka Krun Macula) bordered by the icy basins of Sputnik Planitia

image credit: NASA

[nasawifey]

[lynxgirlpaws]

There is something special about Pluto having a massive heart on it. It makes me smile. I love you too pluto :)

[zespaceblog]

Pluto

An enhanced colour image of the dwarf planet Pluto as taken by the New Horizons probe as it past in July 2015.

Pluto was supposed to be a fairly featureless ball of Ice, and so when New Horizons turned up and photographed a planet with different colours and textures, it was a real surprise.

The area that makes up white heart (Tombaugh Regio) particularly seems to have a very different make up, with half of it very smooth, and the other showing various elevations.

A close up between the smooth area and the more mountainous one, shows vast Dune systems, although this isn't sand, it's likely nitrogen ice, with the mountains water ice.

Certainly, so much diversity was not expected from Pluto, and these images will probably be our lot for another 30-40 years. In the coming decade Jupiter will no longer be in the same direction as Pluto, adding 10-15 years to any future mission (Jupiter is used to gain a gravitational sling shot boost which really can take many years off the mission time).

So sadly, that means for many of you reading this, you may be retired before you see any new pictures, if at all.

[sciencenewsforstudents]

Pluto’s heart has dunes of methane ice

Pluto’s heart-shaped plains are striped with sand dunes. The sand is made of methane ice.

Pluto’s heart-shaped plains have stripes. Those stripes appear to be dunes, where methane ice makes up the “sand.”

The New Horizons spacecraft snapped images of those plains when it flew by Pluto in July 2015. Those images reveal hundreds of linear ridges that appear to be a new type of dune, say Matt Telfer and his colleagues. Telfer is a planetary scientist at the University of Plymouth in England. His team describes those dunes in the June 1, 2018 Science.

The ridges run parallel to a mountain range known as Al-Idrisi Montes. It sits at the western edge of Sputnik Planitia. Those wide plains of nitrogen ice form part of Pluto’s famous heart-shaped region. Winds between about 1 and 10 meters per second (2 to 22 miles per hour) likely carry methane ice from those mountains and across the plains.

Northwest of a vast plain called Sputnik Planitia are streaks that look like dunes (yellow arrow). Winds sculpted these features, which run parallel to the Al-Idrisi Montes mountains. CREDIT: SWRI, JHU Applied Physics Lab, NASA

The scientists used a computer model to investigate how the methane ice moves. The model even took into account Pluto’s thin atmosphere, which weakens winds. That model now proposes that Pluto’s winds would be strong enough to keep sand-sized methane ice particles moving once they get started. But the winds are probably too weak to lift the grains off the ground in the first place.

Explainer: What is a computer model?

The grains could, however, get a lift from little puffs of air coming from Sputnik Planitia’s nitrogen ice. As the sun heats that ice, it turns into a vapor. That process by which solids turn directly into vapor is called sublimation (Sub-lih-MAY-shun).

Gusts of nitrogen vapor could lift the methane ice particles skyward and into the wind, the team’s research suggests.

“That’s a novel, interesting idea,” says Alexander Hayes. He’s a planetary scientist at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., who was not involved in the work. But he knows about it and wrote a commentary about it in the same issue of Science. Still he cautions, sublimation alone could explain some of the features, without any need for wind.

Explainer: What is a planet?

Dunes are found across the solar system, from Earth to Mars and Saturn’s moon Titan. Each of these worlds has the ingredients for dunes. Those ingredients are a big supply of loose, grainy material and an atmosphere or fluid to move those grains around.

“When you look at dunes across the solar system, something that always strikes me is that they form the same patterns,” Hayes says. This is true “regardless of the environment,” he notes. Finding dunes on Pluto suggests that such features may be ubiquitous (Yu-BIH-qwih-tus). That means they are found in a lot of places — perhaps all over. “If you have the material and a way to move it, you form dunes,” Hayes says. “That’s what this is telling us.”

[skycrorg]

Descubren deslizamientos masivos en Plutón por primera vez Un reanálisis de datos de New Horizons revela seis grandes deslizamientos en Plutón cerca de Sputnik Planitia, marcando los primeros movimientos gravitacionales de masa confirmados en el planeta enano.... https://skycr.org/2026/07/13/descubren-deslizamientos-masivos-en-pluton-por-primera-vez/

Descubren deslizamientos masivos en Plutón por primera vez

[skycrorg]

Massive landslides discovered on Pluto for the first time A reanalysis of New Horizons data reveals six large landslides on Pluto near Sputnik Planitia, marking the first confirmed gravitational mass movements on the dwarf planet.... https://skycr.org/2026/07/13/massive-landslides-discovered-pluto-first-time/

Massive landslides discovered on Pluto for the first time