Close-up of Sputnik Planum shows the slowly overturning cells of nitrogen ice. Boulders of water ice and methane debris (red) that have broken off hills surrounding the heart have collected at the boundaries of the cells. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
A large section of Pluto’s icy surface is renewed by convection that replace older ices with fresher material. Combining computer models with topographic and compositional data gathered by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft last summer, New Horizons team members have been able to determine the depth of this layer of solid nitrogen ice within Pluto’s distinctive “heart” feature, Sputnik Planum – and how fast that ice is flowing.
Mission scientists used state-of-the-art computer simula...
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