Pluto Has Dunes, But They're Not Made of Sand

[Judi Lynn]

By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer | May 31, 2018 02:01 pm ET

- click for image -

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This photo taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft during its July 2015 flyby of Pluto shows the mountain range on the edge of the dwarf planet’s Sputnik Planitia ice plain. Dune formations are clearly visible in the bottom half of the picture.
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Pluto is an uncanny-valley world, with landscapes and vistas that seem strikingly similar to those of Earth — until you take a closer look.

NASA's New Horizons mission, which flew by the dwarf planet in July 2015, found that Pluto has towering mountains, but of water ice rather than rock; vast plains of frozen nitrogen and other exotic materials; and blue skies provided by a wispy atmosphere that contains no appreciable oxygen.

And now, a new study reveals another alien parallel: Pluto has an extensive dune system, but the grains that make up the wind-blown mounds are certainly not sand. [Destination Pluto: NASA's New Horizons Mission in Pictures]

Where mountains meet the plain
Telfer and his colleagues analyzed the imagery New Horizons captured during its epic flyby. They noticed a complex of ridges within Sputnik Planitia, a 620-mile-wide (1,000 kilometers) nitrogen-ice plain that forms the left lobe of Pluto's famous "heart."

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