The latest images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft have scientists stunned – not only for their breathtaking views of Pluto’s majestic icy mountains, streams of frozen nitrogen and haunting low-lying hazes, but also for their strangely familiar, arctic look.
Pluto has blue skies and patches of red frozen water, according to the latest data from NASA's unmanned New Horizons probe, which made a historic flyby of the dwarf planet in July.
"Large expanses of Pluto don't show exposed water ice because it's apparently masked by other, more-volatile ices across most of the planet," science team member Jason Cook said.
"Understanding why water appears exactly where it does, and not in other places, is a challenge that we are digging into."
The areas that seem to contain the most water ice also appear bright red in recent colour images of Pluto.
"I'm surprised that this water ice is so red," science team member Silvia Protopapa said.
"We don't yet understand the relationship between water ice and the reddish tholin colorants on Pluto's surface."
Scientists have previously reported seeing flowing nitrogen ice glaciers on the surface of Pluto.
The New Horizons spacecraft attempts to fly by a mysterious object known as Ultima Thule, believed to be a primordial building block of the solar system. Three years after taking the first spectacular photos of Pluto, New Horizons is four billion miles from Earth, trying to achieve the most distant flyby in NASA’s history. If successful, it will shed light on one of the least understood regions of our solar system: the Kuiper Belt. NOVA is embedded with the New Horizons mission team, following the action in real time as they uncover the secrets of what lies beyond Pluto. (Premieres January 2, 2019 at 9 pm on PBS)
To get a sense of the download speeds New Horizons is sending data back to us at - it will take until sometime NEXT YEAR to send all of the high resolution photographs back to us.
To get a sense of the download speeds New Horizons is sending data back to us at - it will take until sometime NEXT YEAR to send all of the high resolution photographs back to us.
Like waiting for porn on a 28.8k modem
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