nitrogen ice tagged posts

An image taken by the Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC) on NASA’s New Horizon spacecraft shows Sputnik Planum. Credit: Image courtesy of NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

On Pluto, icebergs floating in a sea of nitrogen ice are key to a possible explanation of the quilted appearance of the Sputnik Planum region of the dwarf planet’s surface. Data reported by NASA’s New Horizons New Horizons mission to the Pluto system shows unusual terrain in this region, which features a large deposit of nitrogen ice with a pattern of polygons that are thickest at their centers and dip at their edges. Purdue University researchers have proposed that the polygons seen in the images could be individual Rayleigh-Bénard convection cells.

“Evi...

In the northern region of Pluto’s Sputnik Planum, swirl-shaped patterns of light and dark suggest that a surface layer of exotic ices has flowed around obstacles and into depressions, much like glaciers on Earth. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

NASA’s New Horizons mission has found evidence of exotic ices flowing across Pluto’s surface, at the left edge of its bright heart-shaped area. New close-up images from the spacecraft’s Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) reveal signs of recent geologic activity, something scientists hoped to find but didn’t expect. “We’ve only seen surfaces like this on active worlds like Earth and Mars,” said mission co-investigator John Spencer of SwRI.

The new close-up images show fascinating detail within the Texas-sized plain (Sputnik Planum) ...