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"
And If you were wondering:
https://twitter.com/CarlyHowett/status/652159548313104386
Press Release: "New Horizons Finds Blue Skies and Water Ice on Pluto"
Plutos Blue Sky: Plutos 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 Saturns 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.
The first color images of Plutos atmospheric hazes, returned by NASAs New Horizons spacecraft last week, reveal that the hazes are blue.
Who would have expected a blue sky in the Kuiper Belt? Its 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.
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.
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.
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.pngLarge expanses of Pluto dont show exposed water ice, said science team member Jason Cook, of SwRI, because its 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. Im surprised that this water ice is so red, says Silvia Protopapa, a science team member from the University of Maryland, College Park. We dont yet understand the relationship between water ice and the reddish tholin colorants on Pluto's surface.
And If you were wondering:
https://twitter.com/CarlyHowett/status/652159548313104386