Pluto has water ice. Lots of ice

Scientists continue to analyze the information sent to Earth by the device New Horizons . Data transfer will continue for many more months, which means that there will still be a lot of discoveries. It has now become known that on the surface of Pluto one can easily find water ice, whole mountains of such ice. A new map from NASA shows the placement of ice from H ₂ 0 on the surface of the planet.

This is quite unexpected news, even for those professionals who have been researching Pluto for quite some time. In order to obtain an estimate of the amount of ice on Pluto, astronomers compared the "spectral signature" of light reflected from a dwarf planet with a spectrum of pure water ice. As it turned out, there is a lot of ice, but all of it is mixed with methane ice, nitrogen ice and carbon monoxide.

The NASA team received a better image of the distribution of ice on the surface of Pluto, combining two photos with the New Horizons infrared instrument. Such an operation allowed to “strengthen” the signs of the presence of water ice, at the same time “drowning out” other “spectral signatures”. As a result, we can see how much water ice there is - the blue color shows the placement of frozen water on Pluto.
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As you can see, on Sputnik Planum is not so much water. This is an indirect confirmation of the fact that the plain is covered with relatively new ice, nitrogen, methane and CO. The picture is similar with the northern regions, including the Lowell Regio.

As far as can be judged, water ice here is something of a forming material. Mountains are made up of water, and many plains are covered with it. Other ices are more unstable, and are subject to change under the influence of even that small amount of solar radiation that reaches the surface of Pluto.