Bonnie J. Buratti (JPL) -- Pluto: Everything Strange and Wonderful We Learned from New Horizons

The encounter of New Horizons at Pluto completes the reconnaissance of the Solar System and provides the first view of the “Third Zone” of thousands of small icy bodies that enclose the orbits of the outer gaseous planets. This talk will describe the major results from the mission as well as an ongoing analysis of both spacecraft and ground-based measurements, including some from Palomar Observatory’s adaptive optics system. One major discovery of the mission is the remarkable variation in albedo on Pluto, surpassed only by Iapetus and providing vast temperature differences that may be the basis for many of the active processes on Pluto.