NASA snap shows Pluto’s atmosphere in infrared wavelength

In other news GeekWire reported, a color-coded map from NASA’s New Horizons mission shows where Pluto’s frozen water is concentrated, just in case we need to fill up our tanks on the way to Alpha Centauri or Planet Nine.

The new image, taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft in July, shows the blue ring of the dwarf planet’s atmosphere as it would appear in the infrared – a kind of light invisible to the human eye.

It is the first image of the atmosphere made with data from the New Horizons Ralph/Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA) instrument. “This is probably because water ice is hidden by volatile materials like methane, nitrogen and carbon monoxide”.

The new map has come up with a significant discovery that shows exposed water ice to be notably more widespread throughout the surface of the dwarf planet than was previously known. Rather the Sputnik Planum has big glaciers, but all of them are composed of methane, nitrogen and carbon monoxide ice. Even, Lowell Regio is also mostly water ice free, but researchers do not have an idea as to why this region is so bare.

The investigators of NASA combined the two images obtained through the infrared imager of New Horizons and prepared a digital cube of data instead of a flat image.

“The fact that even cold, distant Pluto could have a subsurface ocean means that there are potential habitats even in apparently unpromising locations”, New Horizons scientist Francis Nimmo told Smithsonian magazine in January.

Pluto’s atmosphere is thought to be permeated with a significant amount of hydrocarbon particles, which collect into a sort of haze. The space agency’s New Horizons craft conducted a flyby of Pluto in July previous year.

Meanwhile, the white patches illustrate sunlight that’s bounced off the smoother, more reflective parts of Pluto’s surface.

Scientists believed that the haze is a photochemical smog resulting from the action of sunlight on methane and other molecules, producing a complex mixture of hydrocarbons such as acetylene and ethylene.

NASA said the technique had disadvantages.