Pluto Geologic Map: Use of Crater Data to Understand Age Relationships

TL;DR

This study uses crater data and a new visualization method to analyze Pluto's surface ages, revealing a range of geologic units from young, resurfaced terrains to ancient, cratered regions, despite uncertainties in impactor flux.

Contribution

It introduces a novel distributed R-plot visualization and applies crater analysis to determine relative and quantitative ages of Pluto's geologic units.

Findings

Large areas of young, crater-free terrains indicate recent resurfacing.

Crater analysis provides relative and quantitative age estimates despite flux uncertainties.

Variety of surface morphologies suggests diverse resurfacing processes.

Abstract

Pluto's surface displays a wide variety of geologic units from smooth plains to extremely rugged mountainous expanses. These terrains range in age from young, actively resurfaced regions (no observable craters even in the highest-resolution New Horizons images) to old, heavily cratered, eroded regions. Here we expand upon the crater data analysis and the independent crater data set used in the production of a 1:7M scale geologic map of Pluto that is to be published by the United States Geologic Survey (USGS). We present both relative ages based on crater spatial density (number of craters in a given size bin per km^2) and also quantitative ages (e.g., 2 Ga) using the estimated impactor flux onto Pluto. The techniques presented here were developed specifically for the information available from a USGS geologic map, where smaller craters are mapped as points only (no specific diameter information per crater). We developed a new type of visualization, called a distributed R-plot, to understand the relative ages of the geologic units. The uncertainties in the current knowledge of the Kuiper belt populations and impactor flux at Pluto propagate to large uncertainties in the estimated quantitative ages (~a factor of two). However, both relative and quantitative ages from crater analysis were still valuable tools in developing the sequence of geologic events. Pluto has large areas of crater-free young terrains (13 units making up ~27% of mapped higher-resolution surface area), with widely varying morphologies, indicating a variety of resurfacing mechanisms, both exogenic and endogenic, likely active into Pluto's recent past or present.