2024-10-30
56 分钟This week we discuss recent research on the origins of Pluto’s heart and what it can tell us about whether or not the dwarf planet has a subsurface ocean with Adeene Denton from the University of Arizona.
We're investigating the heart on Pluto this week on Planetary Radio.
I'm Sarah Allahmed of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond.
It's been almost a decade since NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto, and the data still yields results.
This week, we're exploring the origins of Sputnik Planitia, the western lobe of the heart shaped impact feature on Pluto.
It might be able to tell us whether or not the dwarf planet actually has a subsurface ocean.
Edine Denton from the University of Arizona will join us to talk about the work she and her colleagues at the University of Bern in Switzerland have been doing to understand oblique impacts, or as they call them, splats.
Then Bruce Betts, our chief scientist, joins me for a roundup of the most significant impacts in our solar system in what's Up?
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On July 14, 2015, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto.
It was the first time we'd visited that world and its moons, and our first mission to explore a body in the Kuiper Belt.
What we found there was astonishing.
Pluto is a complex world with varied geology and five moons, the largest of which is Charon, or Charon, depending on how you like to pronounce it.
Pluto has glaciers, crevasses, thin clouds, and a beautiful heart shaped feature filled with nitrogen ice.
Tombaugh Regio the so called heart on Pluto seemed to be the remnant of a large collision.
But it was puzzling.
What created this feature?
Why was it located near the world's equator?
And what could that tell us about its interior?
The laws of physics tell us that we should expect a feature like this to migrate toward one of the world's poles.