Related papers: Impact Craters on Pluto and Charon and Terrain Age…
The NASA Dawn mission has extensively examined the surface of asteroid Vesta, the second most massive body in the main belt. The high quality of the gathered data provides us with an unique opportunity to determine the surface and internal…
We present three near-infrared spectra of Pluto taken with the IRTF and SpeX, an optical spectrum of Triton taken with the MMT and the Red Channel Spectrograph, and previously published spectra of Pluto, Triton, and Eris. We combine these…
Like many airless planetary surfaces, the surface of the Moon is scattered by populations of blocks and smaller boulders. These features decrease in abundance with increasing exposure time due to comminution by impact bombardment and…
The Pluto-Charon binary system is the best-studied representative of the binary Kuiper-belt population. Its origins are vital to understanding the formation of other Kupier-belt objects (KBO) and binaries, and the evolution of the outer…
Evidence is seen for young, fresh surfaces among Near-Earth and Main-Belt asteroids even though space-weathering timescales are shorter than the age of the surfaces. A number of mechanisms have been proposed to refresh asteroid surfaces on…
It has been hypothesized that the impactors that created the majority of the observable craters on the ancient lunar highlands were derived from the main asteroid belt in such a way that preserved their size-frequency distribution. A more…
While the floors of deep lunar craters are largely shielded from solar radiation and thus provide an ideal thermal environment for water ice accumulation, meteoroids on highly inclined orbits can easily access permanently shadowed regions…
We present the first measurements of Charon's far-ultraviolet surface reflectance, obtained by the Alice spectrograph on New Horizons. We find no measurable flux shortward of 1650 A, and Charon's geometric albedo is $<0.019$ ($3\sigma$) at…
Subsequent to the Moon's formation, late accretion to the terrestrial planets strongly modified the physical and chemical nature of silicate crusts and mantles. This alteration came in the form of melting through impacts, as well as the…
Context. The equatorial region of Cthulhu as revealed by New Horizons appears to be generally dark and largely devoid of volatiles because its surface albedo is low. Localized bright patches, however, which are interpreted as CH4 frost, are…
We calculate the current spatial distribution of projectile delivery to the Earth and Moon using numerical orbital dynamics simulations of candidate impactors drawn from a debiased Near-Earth-Object (NEO) model. Surprisingly, we find that…
Haze in Pluto's atmosphere was detected in images by both the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) and the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) on New Horizons. LORRI observed haze up to altitudes of at least 200 km above Pluto's…
The spacings of super-Earths in multi-transiting systems exhibit a distribution that is broad and mostly featureless, with the exception of notable excesses of planet pairs situated a few percent wide of first-order mean motion resonances…
We present a coupled reorientation and climate model, to understand how true polar wander (TPW) and atmospheric condensation worked together to create the Sputnik Planitia (SP) ice sheet and reorient it to its present-day location on Pluto.…
Arabia Terra is a region of Mars where signs of past-water occurrence are recorded in several landforms. Broad and local scale geomorphological, compositional and hydrological analyses point towards pervasive fluid circulation through time.…
There is growing evidence that the population of close-in planets discovered by the Kepler mission was sculpted by atmospheric loss, though the typical timescale for this evolution is not well-constrained. Among a highly complete sample of…
Prior studies have hypothesized that some polluted white dwarfs record continent-like granitic crust--which is abundant on Earth and perhaps uniquely indicative of plate tectonics. But these inferences derive from only a few elements, none…
Following the detection of CO and HCN in Pluto's atmosphere, we report on new ALMA observations of Pluto with two main goals: (i) obtaining spatially-resolved measurements (~0.06'' on the ~0.15'' disk subtended by Pluto and its atmosphere)…
(Abridged) The orbits of the recently discovered satellites of Pluto, S/2005 P2 and S/2005 P1, are significantly non-Keplerian, even if P2 and P1 have negligible masses, because the mass ratio of Charon-Pluto is ~0.1. We present an analytic…
New Horizons observations suggest that CH4 on Pluto has a complex history, involving reservoirs of different composition, thickness and stability controlled by volatile processes occurring on different timescales. In order to interpret…