Mondo Knows Facts
Pluto features a giant heart-shaped nitrogen glacier
Sputnik Planitia is a vast plain of frozen nitrogen ice on the dwarf planet
Images from the New Horizons spacecraft revealed a prominent heart-shaped geological feature on Pluto named Tombaugh Regio. The left lobe, Sputnik Planitia, is a vast glacier composed of nitrogen, carbon monoxide and methane ice that actively undergoes slow thermal convection.
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Tags: pluto, glacier, nitrogen
Pluto features a giant heart-shaped nitrogen glacier: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Sputnik Planitia is a vast plain of frozen nitrogen ice on the dwarf planet. The figure is taken from NASA Science, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a space fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Space shelf, one of 1,090 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
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- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.
