Sleipnir Fossa is named for the powerful, eight-legged horse of Norse mythology that carried the god Odin into the underworld.Djanggawul Fossae defines a network of long, narrow depressions named for the Djanggawuls, three ancestral beings in indigenous Australian mythology who traveled between the island of the dead and Australia, creating the landscape and filling it with vegetation.Al-Idrisi Montes honors Ash-Sharif al-Idrisi (1100-1165/66), a noted Arab mapmaker and geographer whose landmark work of medieval geography is sometimes translated as 'The Pleasure of Him Who Longs to Cross the Horizons.â€�.Tenzing Montes and Hillary Montes are mountain ranges honoring Tenzing Norgay (1914-1986) and Sir Edmund Hillary (1919-2008), the Indian/Nepali Sherpa and New Zealand mountaineer were the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest and return safely.Sputnik Planitia is a large plain named for Sputnik 1, the first space satellite, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957.Later in life she taught mathematics and economics. Burney crater honors Venetia Burney (1918-2009), who as an 11-year-old schoolgirl suggested the name 'Pluto' for Clyde Tombaugh's newly discovered planet.astronomer who discovered Pluto in 1930 from Lowell Observatory in Arizona. Tombaugh Regio honors Clyde Tombaugh (1906-1997), the U.S.The names, listed below, pay homage to the underworld mythology, pioneering space missions, historic pioneers who crossed new horizons in exploration, and scientists and engineers associated with Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. The names were proposed by NASA's New Horizons team following the first reconnaissance of Pluto and its moons by the New Horizons spacecraft in 2015. Scientist theorize that these fractures are caused by global-scale extension of Pluto’s water-ice crust, whereas the spider-like fractures may be caused by a concentrated source of stress in the crust.The International Astronomical Union (IAU), the internationally recognized authority for naming celestial bodies and their surface features, approved names of 14 surface features on Pluto in August 2017. “The pattern these fractures form is like nothing else we’ve seen in the outer solar system, and shows once again that anywhere we look on Pluto, we see something different.”įractures found elsewhere on Pluto often run parallel to each other rather than converging at one central point like a spider body. “Oh, what a tangled web Pluto’s geology weaves,” said Oliver White, a member of the New Horizons geology team from NASA Ames Research Center. The northern and western fractures carve into Pluto’s rolling plains, and the southern fractures stretch into Tartarus Dorsa’s bladed terrain. The shortest fracture is less than 60 miles long. In Norse mythology, “Sleipnir” refers to an eight-legged horse who often galloped into the underworld, with the god Odin the Wanderer on his back. The longest fracture runs more than 360 miles long, north to south, and is informally called Sleipnir Fossa. Each fracture can stretch for hundreds of miles and exposes an underlying layer of red deposits. It rather resembles novae, radially fractured centers on Venus. At least six fractures extend from a central point where they all meet, creating the spider’s “legs” (indicated in the image with the white arrows). A spider-like feature stretches over Pluto’s icy skin.

Sleipnir fossa