Pluto may have a massive subsurface ocean under its heart-shaped region, Sputnik Planitia, aligned with Pluto's tidally-locked satellite Charon:
Pluto may harbour a slushy water ocean beneath its most prominent surface feature, known as the "heart". This could explain why part of the heart-shaped region - called Sputnik Planitia - is locked in alignment with Pluto's largest moon Charon. A viscous ocean beneath the icy crust could have acted as a heavy, irregular mass that rolled Pluto over, so that Sputnik Planitia was facing the moon.
[...] Sputnik Planitia is a circular region in the heart's left "ventricle" and is aligned almost exactly opposite Charon. In addition, Pluto and Charon are tidally locked, which results in Pluto and Charon always showing the same face to each other.
"If you were to draw a line from the centre of Pluto's moon Charon through Pluto, it would come out on the other side, almost right through Sputnik Planitia. That line is what we call the tidal axis" said James Keane, from the University of Arizona, co-author of one of a pair of papers published on the subject in Nature journal. This is strongly suggestive of a particular evolutionary course for Pluto. The researchers contend that Sputnik Planitia formed somewhere else on Pluto and then dragged the entire dwarf planet over - by as much as 60 degrees - relative to its spin axis.
Also at UCSC.
Reorientation of Sputnik Planitia implies a subsurface ocean on Pluto (DOI: 10.1038/nature20148) (DX)
Previously: New Horizons Finishes Sending 2015 Flyby Data
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NASA's New Horizons probe has completed the transfer of data from the Pluto-Charon flyby after around 15 months of transmissions. The data will be vetted before NASA sends the command to erase the probe's storage:
Having traveled from the New Horizons spacecraft over 3.1 billion miles (five hours, eight minutes at light speed), the final item – a segment of a Pluto-Charon observation sequence taken by the Ralph/LEISA imager – arrived at mission operations at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, at 5:48 a.m. EDT on Oct. 25. The downlink came via NASA's Deep Space Network station in Canberra, Australia. It was the last of the 50-plus total gigabits of Pluto system data transmitted to Earth by New Horizons over the past 15 months.
[...] Because it had only one shot at its target, New Horizons was designed to gather as much data as it could, as quickly as it could – taking about 100 times more data on close approach to Pluto and its moons than it could have sent home before flying onward. The spacecraft was programmed to send select, high-priority datasets home in the days just before and after close approach, and began returning the vast amount of remaining stored data in September 2015. "We have our pot of gold," said Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman, of APL.
The New Horizons Kuiper Belt Extended Mission (KEM) will involve a flyby of the Kuiper belt object 2014 MU69 on January 1, 2019. The object is estimated to have a diameter of 30-45 km.
Evidence supports 'hot start' scenario and early ocean formation on Pluto (SD)
The accretion of new material during Pluto's formation may have generated enough heat to create a liquid ocean that has persisted beneath an icy crust to the present day, despite the dwarf planet's orbit far from the sun in the cold outer reaches of the solar system.
This "hot start" scenario, presented in a paper published June 22 in Nature Geoscience [DOI: 10.1038/s41561-020-0595-0] [DX], contrasts with the traditional view of Pluto's origins as a ball of frozen ice and rock in which radioactive decay could have eventually generated enough heat to melt the ice and form a subsurface ocean.
[...] The researchers calculated that if Pluto formed over a period of less that 30,000 years, then it would have started out hot. If, instead, accretion took place over a few million years, a hot start would only be possible if large impactors buried their energy deep beneath the surface.
The new findings imply that other large Kuiper belt objects probably also started out hot and could have had early oceans. These oceans could persist to the present day in the largest objects, such as the dwarf planets Eris and Makemake.
Previously:
Pluto's 'Heart' Sheds Light On Possible Buried Ocean
Subsurface Ocean Could Explain Pluto's "Heart" Feature Aligning with Charon
Pluto Has an Underground Ocean Kept Warm by a Layer of Gassy Ice
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 18 2016, @05:39AM
No one will ever go there. Space exploration is mental masturbation for eggheads.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 18 2016, @05:55AM
I said the same to Magellan, Columbus, Cook. The idiots ignored me. Morons! Cook even got eaten.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 18 2016, @06:10AM
The differences being, dear smug asshole, the vast distance involved and the inhospitable environment. By the time of Columbus, intercontinental migrations had occurred multiple times, without ships, by people on foot. Whereas no one has ever, at any time in history, ever ventured beyond the moon.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by janrinok on Friday November 18 2016, @07:52AM
So, are you arguing that because no-one has yet travelled beyond the moon that no-one ever will? Are you ignoring whatever discoveries and inventions might happen in the future that make travelling such huge distances possible. I bet they scoffed when someone once said 'I am going to build a flying machine that will carry me as high as birds might fly'. They scoffed, but they were wrong.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 18 2016, @08:11PM
Yes, that's the assertion. No one will travel to Pluto.
Your example of flying birds is terrible, because humans have been capable of flying forever. Climb a tree and jump, or jump off a cliff, and you're flying. Now you might well die when you land, but the fact is you flew.
No one has ever traveled beyond the moon, because there's nothing valuable out there that can't be obtained on earth. And there certainly aren't any humans out there to go to war with. The entire purpose of the moonshot was to produce the necessary technology to make intercontinental warfare practical, and that goal has been achieved already. There's no additional benefit to traveling farther out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 18 2016, @07:52PM
Cook even got eaten.
Could have seen that one coming!
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Friday November 18 2016, @02:37PM
Thanks for the article. Always nice to read such things. Don't have much to comment on because it is a bit beyond my knowledge, but a great read none the less!
(Score: 1) by charon on Friday November 18 2016, @11:30PM