The new map shows exposed water ice to be considerably more widespread across Pluto’s surface than was previously known – an important discovery.
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According to a new data collected by NASA New Horizons spacecraft, Pluto has layers of frozen water covering its surface, a lot more than anticipated by the astronomers previously.
Water ice is called the crustal “bedrock” of Pluto on which its more volatile ice draws their seasonally changing patterns. Earlier also, it was the considered that the Sputnik Planum is basically a very big glacier comprised of nitrogen ice, methane ice, and carbon monoxide. In this image sunlight is coming from above and behind Pluto, was captured on July 14, 2015.
And these observation statistics were used to develop false-color maps and plot the water ice concentration on Pluto.
A new photo of Pluto’s atmosphere makes the invisible visible.
Water ice on Pluto is like rock on earth as it can form everything from soaring, mountain to pitted valleys.
The map on the left was searching for pure water ice, the map on the right confirms the water ice found on the left, but was a more sensitive method picking up regions with less water ice the first method would have missed. The space agency’s New Horizons craft conducted a flyby of Pluto in July a year ago.
Pluto’s atmosphere is thought to be permeated with a significant amount of hydrocarbon particles, which collect into a sort of haze.
There are whitish patches around Pluto’s limbs, which are sunlight bouncing off more reflective or smoother areas on Pluto’s surface – with the largest patch being the western section of the informally named Cthulhu Regio, Nasa said. As the sunlight hits this smog, it jumpstarts photochemical reactions on methane and other molecules, resulting in a complex mix of other, smaller hydrocarbons like acetylene and ethylene.
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Despite the much greater sensitivity of LEISA, the instrument can only show those areas which are either rich in water ice or low in methane.
