Pluto's Surface Has a Surprising Amount of Water Ice

[Eugene]

Source: Space.com

Pluto's Surface Has a Surprising Amount of Water Ice

By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer | January 29, 2016 07:52am ET

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

Scientists created the map using data collected by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft during its epic flyby of Pluto last July.

The new map is more sensitive than an earlier version also produced using flyby observations, and thus shows more water ice — the dwarf planet's bedrock material — cropping up across Pluto's surface than had been seen previously, NASA officials said.

"But despite its much greater sensitivity, the map still shows little or no water ice in the informally named places called Sputnik Planum (the left or western region of Pluto’s 'heart') and Lowell Regio (far north on the encounter hemisphere)," NASA officials wrote in a statement Thursday (Jan. 28). "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."

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Read more: http://www.space.com/31775-pluto-water-ice-maps-new-horizons.html

[NBachers]

1. I'd like to drink water from some of that ice, and see what it did to me.

[Travis_0004]

2. I would much rather drink water from pluto than Uranus

[NBachers]

3. How can we quantify the many Uranus jokes out there, waiting to be told?