The newest footage from New Horizons shows that there could be ice volcanoes on Pluto in addition to spinning moons. The footage reveals about 50 new discoveries about Pluto, all discussed at the 47th Annual Meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences held at National Harbor, Maryland.
Pluto gives us one of the endless possibilities
Through the New Horizons’ travels at the edge of space, the probe has shut down all assumptions about the far off planet, which highlights just how important space exploration is. The fact that there could be ice volcanoes on Pluto gives us just one of the endless possibilities that space exploration could bring. By combining a series of images of the Plutonian surface and putting them together to build a 3D model, two of Pluto’s mountains look suspiciously like cryovolcanoes, which are ice volcanoes that may have been active in Pluto’s recent geological past.
New data streams down from New Horizons every week
New data streams down from New Horizons every week, so ice volcanoes on Pluto is another day in the office for the team in charge of the space probe. Pluto is rapidly becoming an important point of focus for the astronomical community.
Ice volcanoes on Pluto could cause a small scale revolution
The footage revealed big mountains with holes at the summit, and on Earth, those can only be called volcanoes. What they contain and what may have once erupted from these precipices is not yet known. Unlike volcanoes on Earth, though, ice volcanoes on Pluto are assumed to expel a slew of different substances including nitrogen, water ice, ammonia or methane, which are all valuable natural resources to Earth. Knowing whether or not they’re actual volcanoes and if they spew this materials would give us significant information on Pluto’s geological evolution, which has been a relevant tier of the space exploration effort since the New Horizons Pluto flyby of July 14. Ice volcanoes on Pluto could once again cause a small scale revolution that could turn global depending on what the nature of these precipices were, are, and could be.
These supposed ice volcanoes on Pluto, informally named Wright Mons and Piccard Mons, are now under close inspection to verify their purpose, their nature and their evolution.
