Pluto has blue skies, patches of red frozen water

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LONDON: Pluto has blue skies and patches of red frozen water, NASA announced on Thursday as new images were transmitted by New Horizons, the first ever spacecraft sent to Pluto.
One of the picture reveals the first color images of Pluto’s atmospheric hazes, which appears to reflect the color blue. According to NASA, the high-altitude haze is quite similar to that seen in Titan, Saturn’s moon. The haze, it added, is caused by the chemical reactions of nitrogen and methane effected by the sunlight and eventually becoming “soot-like particles” growing and settling toward the surface.
“That striking blue tint tells us about the size and composition of the haze particles. 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,” said Carly Howett, science team researcher from Southwest Research Institute.
“Who would have expected a blue sky in the Kuiper Belt? It’s gorgeous,” New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute, Alan Stern, said. The Kuiper Belt is a distant region of the Solar System beyond Neptune, where there are many comets and asteroids.
“All those haze layers are actual layers in pluto’s atmosphere stretching literally more than 100 miles,” Stern added.
The second significant finding from New Horizons is the discovery of exposed regions of water ice that appear bright red in color images. Although “understanding why water appears exactly where it does, and not in other places” is yet to be followed-up, said science team member Jason Cook.
“I’m surprised that this water ice is so red,” Silvia Protopapa, another science team member, said. “We don’t yet understand the relationship between water ice and the reddish tholin colorants on Pluto’s surface.”
“We expected water ice to be there, but we’ve searched for water ice in Pluto’s spectrum for decades and not seen it before now,” Alex Parker, another member from Southwest Research Institute, said via BBC.
New Horizons is currently approximately 3 billion miles away from Earth. In July 2014, it became the first spaceship to pass by the dwarf planet. It is expected to transmit images and data to Earth until next year.