New Horizons Pluto probe notches 3 more discoveries far from Earth - Space.com
"We can't really explain that in Pluto's current configuration," Oliver White, a New Horizons co-investigator at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in California, said during a presentation Tuesday at LPSC.
White's team also found that Pluto's subsurface ocean likely provided some push to Sputnik and helped shift a bulk of the dwarf planet's mass toward its equator.(Image credit: James Tuttle Keane (JPL/Caltech)/NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/SwRI) In addition to helping scientists study ancient landscapes on Pluto, New Horizons data is providing clues about its more recent features.New Horizons scientists are seeing evidence that so-called bladed terrain — a direct response of the landscape to Pluto's changing climate, marked in red on this map — extends across much of the planet."This is surprising, and a new piece in the puzzle of how planetesimals — building blocks of the planets — like Arrokoth and other Kuiper Belt objects come together," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, from the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, said in a statement(opens in new tab).Previous research showed that Wenu tidally interacted with the smaller of the two objects; both lost some angular momentum by ejecting material and eventually merged to form today's Arrokoth.