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New Horizons at Pluto

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The New Horizons mission has revealed Pluto and its moon Charon to be geologically active worlds. The familiar, yet exotic, landforms suggest that geologic processes operate similarly across the Solar System, even in its cold outer reaches.

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Figure 1: Landforms on Pluto and Charon compared to other Solar System examples.
Figure 2: Phase diagrams of four geologically relevant substances: nitrogen, ethane, carbon dioxide and water.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Paul Schenk is at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, 3600 Bay Area Boulevard, Houston, Texas 77058, USA,

    Paul Schenk

  2. Francis Nimmo is in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California at Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California 95064, USA,

    Francis Nimmo

Authors
  1. Paul Schenk
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  2. Francis Nimmo
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Correspondence to Paul Schenk.

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Schenk, P., Nimmo, F. New Horizons at Pluto. Nature Geosci 9, 411–412 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2729

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