Wright Mons Volcano in Pluto

April 1, 2022

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In Context

Pluto has giant ice volcano like Wright Mons that could hint at the possibility of life

As per report which shows that icy lava flows have recently covered substantial tracts of its surface

About Wright Mons Volcano

It was spotted on the surface of Pluto by the New Horizons spacecraft in July 2015.
It was informally named by the New Horizons team in honour of the Wright brothers.
It is about 150km across its base and has a central depression (a hole) 40-50km wide, with a floor at least as low as the surrounding terrain.
It rises 4-5km above its surroundings.
Its volume exceeds 20 thousand cubic kilometres.
- It is considerably less than the volume of Mars’s biggest volcanoes.
The slopes of Wright Mons and much of its surroundings are seen to be crowded with hummocks up to 1km high and mostly 6-12km across.
- These hummocks are made primarily of water-ice, rather than nitrogen- or methane-ice that covers some other young regions on Pluto.
- The hummocks were likely created by some sort of ice volcanism, known by the technical term “cryovolcanism” — erupting icy water rather than molten rock.

Other volcano

Piccard Mons : It is less well characterised than Wright Mons because, by the time New Horizons made its closest approach, Pluto’s rotation had carried Piccard Mons into darkness.
The flyby was so fast that only the side of Pluto facing the Sun at the right time could be seen in detail.
However, New Horizons was able to image Piccard Mons thanks to sunlight weakly reflected onto the ground by haze in Pluto’s atmosphere.

Pluto

It is a dwarf planet.
- A dwarf planet travels around, or orbits, the sun just like other planets. But it is much smaller.

Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930. He was an astronomer from the United States.
- Venetia Burney named Pluto that same year. She was an 11-year-old girl from England.

Pluto is not very big. It is only half as wide as the United States.
- Pluto is smaller than Earth’s moon.
This dwarf planet takes 248 Earth years to go around the sun.
Pluto is in an area of space called the Kuiper (KY-per) Belt.
- Thousands of small, icy objects like Pluto but smaller are in the Kuiper Belt.

Pluto is very, very cold. It is much colder than Antarctica.
- It is so cold that Earth’s air would freeze into a kind of snow there.

Pluto has less gravity than Earth. This means a person would weigh much less on Pluto than on Earth.

Source:DTE