A decade after NASA's New Horizons spacecraft zoomed past Pluto and its moons, scientists are still uncovering secrets from the data. The latest discovery: the first confirmed landslides on the distant dwarf planet.
Researchers reanalyzing high-resolution imagery from the 2015 flyby have identified six large landslides on Pluto, all clustered around the edges of Sputnik Planitia — the vast, heart-shaped nitrogen glacier that dominates the dwarf planet's surface. The findings were published June 13 in the journal Icarus.
Landslides Across the Solar System
Terrestrial planets experience landslides frequently, and they've been spotted on moons, asteroids, and comets. But Pluto had stubbornly resisted showing evidence of them — until now.
"Landslides play an important role in shaping landforms," said Maria Teresa Brunetti, a physicist at the National Research Council in Perugia, Italy, and coauthor of the study.
Each of the six newly identified landslides sits along the inner rim of an impact crater, where the terrain is steep and unstable. The largest covers approximately 130 square kilometers — about twice the size of Manhattan — placing it near the upper size range of landslides that typically occur on Earth.
A Friction Mystery
The landslides range in height from 1,500 to 2,200 meters. That's relatively small compared to landslides elsewhere in the solar system, but the features have a surprising characteristic: material tumbling down Pluto's slopes travels farther than expected.
Compared with landslides of similar heights on other worlds, those on Pluto tend to run out over longer distances. This suggests that material sliding down Pluto's slopes experiences significantly less friction on average — a finding that helps scientists constrain the material properties of Pluto's icy surface.
The team believes Pluto is likely home to many more undiscovered landslides. Finding them will require further analysis of New Horizons data and, hopefully, future missions to the dwarf planet.
A Decade of Discovery
New Horizons conducted its historic flyby of Pluto on July 14, 2015, capturing the first close-up images of the then-last unexplored planet in our solar system. The encounter revealed a surprisingly complex world with glaciers, mountains, haze layers, and flowing nitrogen ice.
The landslide discovery adds to the growing list of ongoing findings from that flyby. Scientists continue to mine the data, uncovering new insights about Pluto's geology, atmosphere, and evolution.
Understanding landslides on Pluto isn't just about satisfying curiosity — it helps planetary scientists understand how icy worlds evolve over time, how their surfaces are reshaped, and what physical processes drive change in the outer solar system.
