Impact Crater Morphometry on Pluto: Implications for Surface Composition and Evolution
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract New Horizons showed that Pluto exhibits a wide range of geologic groups, with much of the surface modified by volatile ice processes. Impact craters are a valuable tool to investigate how these regions have evolved, as they record the effects of various modification mechanisms and retain information on the properties of the bedrock ice(s). In this work, we use Pluto’s crater population to quantify the extent of surface modification and identify variations in surface properties on Pluto. In this study, we have measured the relative depth of Pluto’s craters compared to minimally modified water-ice craters to interpret how the craters may have evolved and/or what the information tells us about the surface properties of the bedrock. We found a trend of increasing crater relative depth from southeast to northwest that may reflect the conditions of an ancient surface when a thicker layer of volatile ice may have existed, possibly changed by polar wander after the Sputnik impact. We have identified anomalously deep craters across Pluto’s surface, with a concentration in Cthulhu Macula, suggesting different bedrock-ice properties in this region. Other deep craters may be influenced by extraneous factors, such as impactor speed. Overall, this study expands on our understanding of the evolution and composition of Pluto’s surface and sets a road map for further investigations into Pluto’s surface evolution.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it