Revealed: NASA's New Horizons finds blue skies, water ice on Pluto

Photo cerdits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Washington: In a significant finding, the first color images of Pluto's atmospheric hazes returned by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft last week revealed that the planet's hazes are blue.

The US space agency announced the breakthrough Pluto discovery on Thursday.

“Who would have expected a blue sky in the Kuiper Belt? It’s 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.

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.

Photo credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

“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.”

The New Horizons spacecraft is currently 3.1 billion miles (5 billion kilometers) from Earth, with all systems healthy and operating normally.

(Source: NASA)