The Pluto System After New Horizons

S. Alan Stern. William Grundy, William B. McKinnon, Harold A. Weaver, Leslie A. Young
(Submitted on 15 Dec 2017)

The discovery of Pluto in 1930 presaged the discoveries of both the Kuiper Belt and ice dwarf planets, which are the third class of planets in our solar system. From the 1970s to the 19990s numerous fascinating attributes of the Pluto system were discovered, including multiple surface volatile species, Pluto’s large satellite Charon, and its atmosphere. These attributes, and the 1990s discovery of the Kuiper Belt and Pluto’s cohort of small Kuiper Belt planets, motivated the exploration of Pluto. That mission, called New Horizons (NH), revolutionized knowledge of Pluto and its system of satellites in 2015. Beyond providing rich geological, compositional, and atmospheric data sets, New Horizons demonstrated that Pluto itself has been surprisingly geologically active throughout the past 4 billion years, and that the planet exhibits a surprisingly complex range of atmospheric phenomenology and geologic expression that rival Mars in their richness.

Subjects:    Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Journal reference:    Annual Reviews of Astronomy ans Astrophysics 2018
Cite as:    arXiv:1712.05669 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:1712.05669v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Alan Stern
[v1] Fri, 15 Dec 2017 13:44:26 GMT (9159kb)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.05669