Blue Skies and Frozen Water Surfaces Found on Pluto Planet.
NASA officially declared today that the New Horizons probe has detected trace amounts of exposed water ice on the surface of Pluto during its recent flyby. By using its on board Ralph spectral composition mapper, New Horizons compiled enough data for researchers to affirm the existence of outcrops along the planet’s surface. Not content with stopping there, the space agency also released a series of color images snapped by the probe which beautifully capture Pluto’s blue atmospheric hazes. Considering these findings, when is it okay to start calling Pluto a planet again?
Just this past July, NASA’s New Horizons probe accomplished a nearly 10-year mission to reach (and pass) the dwarf planet Pluto. In the months since its passing, NASA has released a steady stream of information pertaining to Pluto though Thursday’s announcement arguably bears the most fruit. Though there aren’t giant areas of the planet which exhibit patches of the water ice New Horizons detected, the discovery still represents one of the most significant findings in our solar system.
“Large expanses of Pluto don’t show exposed water ice,” Southwest Research Institute science team member Jason Cook says in NASA’s press release, “because it’s apparently masked by other, more volatile ices across most of the planet. Understanding why water appears exactly where it does, and not in other places, is a challenge that we are digging into.”
NASA’s discovery of water on Pluto is yet another incredible accomplishment for the Washington D.C.-based space agency. As it continues to find traces of water on planets both near and far from Earth, an answer to the question of “Does alien life exist?” seems just on the horizon.
