Pluto may have more water ice than once thought

It has also taken incredible pictures of the numerous moons of the dwarf planet, and this also included a picture of the dark side of one of the dwarf planet’s biggest moons, Charon. For instance, Nix and Hydra are only 33 miles and 27 miles, respectively, in their longest directions, whereas Styx and Kerberos are even tinnier. Now, this distant satellite is being seen as never before in stunning images from the New Horizons spacecraft, which passed by the system in 2015.

New Horizons is now 3.3 billion miles (5.31 billion km) from Earth and 150.6 million miles (242.4 million km) beyond Pluto, with all systems healthy and operating normally. That encounter brought the spacecraft as close to Pluto as 7,800 miles (12,550 kilometers). This zone entered polar night all the way back in 1989 and is expected to last until 2107, when sunlight will be shed again on that side of the moon. Charon’s polar temperatures drop to near absolute zero during this long winter.

“After its close approach to Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft snapped this hauntingly attractive image of the night side of Pluto’s largest moon, Charon”.

Images like this latest release from NASA can assist astronomers to develop a map of Charon, as they show some detail not visible in other photographs.

Charon is a little over half of the diameter of Pluto, and dances with the dwarf planet around a central orbital point called a barycenter.

It is on course for a close flyby of a small Kuiper Belt object, 2014 MU69, on January 01, 2019. According to NASA, this shows that water ice is the crustal “bedrock” of Pluto, or that it is the static “canvas” on which other, more volatile ices seasonally vary across the surface.

Water ice is surprisingly abundant on Pluto’s surface, a new map of the dwarf planet reveals.

A false-color image released by NASA shows two different attempts to map out the dispersal of Pluto’s water ice. That meant the earlier maps only highlighted areas that had high water ice levels, but low methane levels.

“This indicates that at least in these regions, Pluto’s icy bedrock is well hidden beneath a thick blanket of other ices such as methane, nitrogen and carbon monoxide”, NASA said in a statement.