P51A-2040
N2 glacial flow on and onto Sputnik Planum

Friday, 18 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Orkan M Umurhan1, Jeffrey M Moore2, Alan D Howard3, William B McKinnon4, Francis Nimmo5, Paul Schenk6, Oliver L White7, William M Grundy8, Alan Stern9, Catherine Olkin10, Harold A Weaver Jr11, Leslie Ann Young10, Kimberly Ennico Smith7 and The New Horizons Geology and Geophysics Investigation Team, (1)SETI Institute Mountain View, Mountain View, CA, United States, (2)NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, United States, (3)University of Virginia Main Campus, Charlottesville, VA, United States, (4)Washington University in St Louis, St. Louis, MO, United States, (5)University of California-Santa Cruz, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Santa Cruz, CA, United States, (6)Lunar and Planetary Institute, Houston, TX, United States, (7)NASA Ames Research Center, MS 245-3, Moffett Field, CA, United States, (8)Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, AZ, United States, (9)Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, CO, United States, (10)Southwest Research Institute Boulder, Boulder, CO, United States, (11)Applied Physics Laboratory Johns Hopkins, Laurel, MD, United States
Abstract:
Sputnik Planum (SP)[1,2] is the high albedo crater-free western portion of Tombaugh Regio imaged in July by the New Horizons LORRI instrument. The relatively high resolution (400 m/pix) LORRI mosaics of the northern portions of the planum bordered by the Cousteau Rupes (CR) scarp reveal surface patterns highly suggestive of viscous flow dynamics. Spectroscopic measurements of SP taken by the New Horizons LEISA instrument also indicate that SP is a region containing (among others) a significant amount of N2 [2]. Taken together these observations suggest the possibility that the high albedo material on SP is glacial N2 ice atop a bedrock-like substrate and the notable lack of craters on SP means that these processes are acting on relatively fast geologic timescales. Using the known properties of N2 ice in the temperature range of interest, we formulate and implement a numerical landform evolution model in order to examine a number of hypothetical evolutionary scenarios for SP and its environs.

[1] All place names on Pluto and Charon are informally known as such as of the writing of this abstract. [2] Stern, S. A et al. 2015 Science.

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