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NASA: New Horizons Finds Blue Skies and Water Ice on Pluto

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C

cameron

Member
This was posted in the New Horizons official thread. Another member suggested a new thread be created for the news.

Press Release: "New Horizons Finds Blue Skies and Water Ice on Pluto"
mUwMnwM.png
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Pluto’s Blue Sky: Pluto’s haze layer shows its blue color in this picture taken by the New Horizons Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC). The high-altitude haze is thought to be similar in nature to that seen at Saturn’s moon Titan. The source of both hazes likely involves sunlight-initiated chemical reactions of nitrogen and methane, leading to relatively small, soot-like particles (called tholins) that grow as they settle toward the surface. This image was generated by software that combines information from blue, red and near-infrared images to replicate the color a human eye would perceive as closely as possible.
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The first color images of Pluto’s atmospheric hazes, returned by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft last week, reveal that the hazes are blue.

“Who would have expected a blue sky in the Kuiper Belt? It’s gorgeous,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado.

The haze particles themselves are likely gray or red, but the way they scatter blue light has gotten the attention of the New Horizons science team. “That striking blue tint tells us about the size and composition of the haze particles,” said science team researcher Carly Howett, also of SwRI. “A blue sky often results from scattering of sunlight by very small particles. On Earth, those particles are very tiny nitrogen molecules. On Pluto they appear to be larger — but still relatively small — soot-like particles we call tholins.”
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In a second significant finding, New Horizons has detected numerous small, exposed regions of water ice on Pluto. The discovery was made from data collected by the Ralph spectral composition mapper on New Horizons.
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Water Ice on Pluto: Regions with exposed water ice are highlighted in blue in this composite image from New Horizons' Ralph instrument, combining visible imagery from the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) with infrared spectroscopy from the Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA). The strongest signatures of water ice occur along Virgil Fossa, just west of Elliot crater on the left side of the inset image, and also in Viking Terra near the top of the frame. A major outcrop also occurs in Baré Montes towards the right of the image, along with numerous much smaller outcrops, mostly associated with impact craters and valleys between mountains. The scene is approximately 280 miles (450 kilometers) across. Note that all surface feature names are informal.
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“Large expanses of Pluto don’t show exposed water ice,” said science team member Jason Cook, of SwRI, “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.”

A curious aspect of the detection is that the areas showing the most obvious water ice spectral signatures correspond to areas that are bright red in recently released color images. “I’m surprised that this water ice is so red,” says Silvia Protopapa, a science team member from the University of Maryland, College Park. “We don’t yet understand the relationship between water ice and the reddish tholin colorants on Pluto's surface.”
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If you want to compare the highlighted water areas with the full enhanced colour image of Pluto, a high res version (8000x8000 pixels, 67.5 MB) is available here: http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/crop_p_color2_enhanced_release.png



And If you were wondering:
M7zBgpZ.png

https://twitter.com/CarlyHowett/status/652159548313104386
 
O

orioto

Good Art™
I've always heard life on earth is a 1 in a trillion chance etc.. cause lots of things had to happen etc... And the universe is soo big, and now we discover pretty close planets are not that different from earth, or at least less than we would have thought.. So what about the odds now ? If on the minuscule number of planet we can actually analyze, there are already a good amount of them with some kind of water.
 
F

fallout

Member
EskimoJoe said:
We're finding water way too frequently now. Maybes it's just everywhere.
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It is!

https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/the-solar-system-and-beyond-is-awash-in-water

"There are several worlds thought to possess liquid water beneath their surfaces, and many more that have water in the form of ice or vapor. Water is found in primitive bodies like comets and asteroids, and dwarf planets like Ceres."

redmetal86 said:
#FreePlutoAndEris
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#FreePlutoAndErisAndCeresAndMaybePallas
 
Indrid Cold1

Indrid Cold1

Member
SwiftDeath said:
That is just beautiful

Such a lovely time to be alive if you care about space exploration
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I would have said the opposite. Robots exploring relentlessly boring balls of ice and mud, and ageing rocket tech carrying cargo to low earth orbit and no further is not remotely exciting. We need MANNED space exploration. This is the exciting and inspirational aspect of it. The current policies of NASA et al towards manned space exploration are a joke.
 
L

LegendofJoe

Member
Over the last 15 years we've discovered that water is really abundant in our solar system. It;s undoubtedly a really good thing for our future exploration prospects.
 
P

Parch

Member
Pluto is proving to be a lot more interesting than I thought it would.
Considering the population of the Kuiper Belt, exploration of our solar system is going to continue to be an interesting adventure.
 
blu

blu

Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
LegendofJoe said:
Over the last 15 years we've discovered that water is really abundant in our solar system. It;s undoubtedly a really good thing for our future exploration prospects.
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One of the early deep-space engine projects comprised a steam engine.
 
A

Angry Grimace

Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
I need a better explanation of that nipple.
 
K

kaching

"GAF's biggest wanker"
Indrid Cold1 said:
I would have said the opposite. Robots exploring relentlessly boring balls of ice and mud, and ageing rocket tech carrying cargo to low earth orbit and no further is not remotely exciting. We need MANNED space exploration. This is the exciting and inspirational aspect of it. The current policies of NASA et al towards manned space exploration are a joke.
Click to expand...
I'm all for man to get out further into space, but let's not kid ourselves that the pace of discovery would be anything like we've seen in the past decade or more if we had a flourishing manned exploration program instead.
 
K

KingSnake

The Birthday Skeleton
I love all these discoveries and the way NASA is communicating lately. It really feels that big steps are made into the right direction.

And Pluto gets its revenge. It might not be big, but it's alive, has a heart and a beautiful blue sunset.
 
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