The Pluto System After New Horizons

TL;DR

The paper reviews the Pluto system's discoveries, emphasizing New Horizons' 2015 mission, which revealed Pluto's geological activity, atmospheric complexity, and satellite system, significantly advancing planetary science.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of Pluto's system and highlights the novel insights gained from the New Horizons mission, including geological activity and atmospheric phenomena.

Findings

Pluto exhibits ongoing geological activity.

New Horizons revealed complex atmospheric phenomena.

Pluto's features rival Mars in diversity.

Abstract

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.