What accounts for Pluto's interesting landscape? As we accumulate more and more data from New Horizons, we're seeing a wide range of geologic activity on the surface, most of it involving such volatile ices as nitrogen, carbon dioxide and methane. But look at the troughs and scarps -- some of them hundreds of kilometers long and several kilometers deep -- and you're seeing what are thought to be extensional faults. These are faults associated with the stretching of the dwarf planet's crust, and in the New Horizons imagery, they appear geologically young. We could look toward tidal interactions with Charon for an answer to what is driving tectonic activity on Pluto, but the Pluto/Charon system has reached what a new paper on the matter calls "the end point of its tidal evolution," with the two objects locked into a synchronous state that makes the prospect unlikely. But changes in the ice shell are another matter, and as Noah Hammond (Brown University) and his fellow researchers are...

Rama is a name that resonates with science fiction fans who remember Arthur C. Clarke's wonderful Rendezvous with Rama (1973). The novel depicts a 50-kilometer starship that enters the Solar System and is intercepted by a human crew, finding remarkable and enigmatic things that I will leave undescribed for the pleasure of those who haven't yet read the book. Suffice it to say that among Clarke's many fine novels, Rendezvous with Rama is, along with The City and the Stars, a personal favorite. What a company called Made in Space Inc. has in mind is something different than Clarke's vision, though it too evokes names from the past, as we'll shortly see. Based in Mountain View, CA the company is embarking on an attempt to turn asteroids into small spacecraft that can move themselves to new trajectories. RAMA in this case stands for Reconstituting Asteroids into Mechanical Automata, and it proceeds by putting 'Seed Craft' on asteroids that will use materials found on the surface. This is...

One reason for catching up with recent planetary science here in the Solar System is the upcoming arrival of Juno, which enters into polar orbit around Jupiter on July 4. Juno's arrival is a reminder that the past year has been packed with interesting news from places like Pluto/Charon (New Horizons), Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (Rosetta), and the topic of today's post, the intriguing dwarf planet Ceres, as studied by the orbiting Dawn spacecraft. But the recent Ceres news hasn't just involved Dawn. Paolo Molaro (INAF-Trieste Astronomical Observatory) had led a study looking at the bright spots Dawn found upon approaching Ceres last year. The data Molaro and team drew on came from the European Southern Observatory's 3.6-meter instrument at La Silla and its HARPS spectrograph, which have shown us not only the motion of the bright spots as Ceres rotates but also variations that indicate volatile material within them. The suggestion is that this material evaporates when exposed to...

Friday's look at the possible composition of Pluto's Sputnik Planum took me into a deep enough dive on the two papers -- Pluto gets my full attention! -- that I ran out of time. I had planned to include the images below in that post, but we can do that this morning as a reminder that New Horizons shows no signs of running out of data. What caught my eye here was the possible presence of a cloud, which you can see at the top right of the left image, and in the top inset image. The wispy structure is tens of kilometers across (the entire inset measures about 230 kilometers) and if it is a cloud, it's the only one we've yet picked out of the New Horizons imagery. But if you consider the rest of the image, it would make sense that we could see a cloud here -- notice how the haze layers are brightened by the sunlight that grazes Pluto's surface at a low angle. Also in the top right inset, the southern parts of Sputnik Planum's nitrogen ice fields show up (click the image to enlarge),...

It's been a week spent catching up with space mission news, focusing on Rosetta, Juno and today, New Horizons. Usually I ponder what I'm going to write each day on Centauri Dreams while I'm having breakfast, a quiet time to reflect on recent events. And if Jay Melosh (Purdue University) is to be believed, I might have taken inspiration from the dish of oatmeal sitting in front of me when it comes to Pluto. Because Melosh and grad student Alex Trowbridge led recent research that may explain what we see at Sputnik Planum. A bit of background before I return to that bowl of oatmeal. We've seen that Sputnik Planum has an unusual appearance, visible in the photo below, that shows patterned polygons. One way of explaining this is to invoke icebergs floating on a sea of nitrogen ice. Melosh and Trowbridge believe the polygons could be what are called Rayleigh-Bénard convection cells, which flag convection that occurs in a fluid that is being heated from below. Says Melosh: "Imagine...

Interesting news about Jupiter this morning even as the Juno spacecraft crosses into the realm of Jupiter's gravity. It was six days ago that Juno made the transition into Jupiter space, where the gravitational influence of Jupiter now dominates over all other celestial bodies. And it will be on July 4 of this year that Juno performs a 35-minute burn of its main engine, imparting a 542 meters per second mean change in velocity to the spacecraft for orbital insertion. The spacecraft's 37 flybys will close to within 5000 kilometers of the cloud tops. I only wish Poul Anderson could be alive to see some of the imagery. I always think of him in relation to Jupiter because of his stunning 1957 story "Call Me Joe," describing the exploration of the planet by remote-controlled life forms (available in Anderson's collection The Dark Between the Stars as well as various science fiction anthologies). Image: Launched in 2011, the Juno spacecraft will arrive at Jupiter in 2016 to study the giant...

Yesterday's look at organic compounds on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko needs to be augmented today by a just released study of the comet with implications for how all comets evolve. But first, a renewed pointer to the Kickstarter campaign for KIC 8462852, the unusual star whose light curves continue to baffle astronomers. Please consider contributing to the project, which would raise enough money ($100,000) to support a year of observations. We're about halfway through the campaign but not yet at the halfway point in funds. Have a look at the information provided on the Kickstarter page, or in my essay A Kickstarter Campaign for KIC 8462852, which also has the relevant links. We know the light curves of 'Tabby's Star' are not periodic, so we need continuous monitoring to gain more data on what may be happening there. If we can raise the funds, the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, already supporting the project, can give us the multi-wavelength observations we need....

The thought that water and organic molecules might have arrived on the early Earth from the impacts of comets and asteroids has long been provocative, and our missions to nearby comets are now paying off with insights into the possibility. It was back in 2004 that the Stardust mission flew past Comet Wild 2, collecting dust samples that showed traces of the amino acid glycine. Possible contamination of the samples during their analysis left the question open, however. Now we have news that the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission has also found glycine -- a significant organic compound that appears in proteins -- at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The spacecraft's ROSINA instrument (Rosetta Orbiter Spectrometer for Ion and Neutral Analysis) detected glycine in October of 2014, with later measurements taken during the August 2015 perihelion event, where cometary outgassing was at its peak. Kathrin Altwegg (University of Bern), who led the study, calls this "...the first...