cryovolcanoes tagged posts

A recent NASA mission to the dwarf planet Ceres found brilliant, white spots of salts on its surface. New research led by The University of Texas at Austin in partnership with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) delved into the factors that influenced the volcanic activity that formed the distinctive spots and that could play a key role in mixing the ingredients for life on other worlds.

The volcanoes on Ceres are cryovolcanoes, a type of volcano that forms on planetary bodies with icy shells and that moves salty water known as cryomagma from underground reservoirs to...

Image from “The atmosphere of Pluto as observed by New Horizons,” by G.R. Gladstone et al. This material relates to a paper that appeared in the March 18, 2016, issue of Science, published by AAAS. The paper, by G.R. Gladstone at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, and colleagues was titled, “The atmosphere of Pluto as observed by New Horizons.” Credit: G.R. Gladstone et al. / Science (2016)

Pluto’s surface exhibits a wide variety of landscapes, results from 5 new studies in this special issue on the New Horizons mission report. The dwarf planet has more differences than similarities with its large moon, Charon. What’s more, the studies in this package reveal, Pluto modifies its space environment – interacting with the solar wind plasma and energetic particles around it...

Pluto’s Wright Mons in color Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Scientists with NASA’s New Horizons mission have assembled this highest-resolution color view of one of two potential cryovolcanoes spotted on the surface of Pluto by the New Horizons spacecraft in July 2015. This feature, known as Wright Mons, was informally named by the New Horizons team in honor of the Wright brothers. At ~90 miles across and 2.5 miles high, this feature is enormous. If it is in fact an ice volcano, it would be the largest such feature discovered in the outer solar system.

Mission scientists are intrigued by the sparse distribution of red material in the image and wonder why it is not more widespread...