Pluto's haze layer shows its blue color in this picture taken by the New Horizons Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC), Oct. 8, 2015.NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI—AP
A NASA spacecraft has discovered that there is blue sky and red ice on Pluto.
New Horizons returned its first color images of Pluto’s atmosphere last week, according to a release by NASA, and the images show a bright blue haze. According to a NASA scientist, the color occurs when small particles in the atmosphere scatter light.
“Who would have expected a blue sky in the Kuiper Belt? It’s gorgeous,” Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator, said in the release.
But that wasn’t the only colorful finding in the new images: New Horizons also returned photographs of exposed water ice on Pluto’s surface, and the ice is often red. NASA scientists don’t yet understand the reason for this coloration.
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), Oct. 8, 2015.NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI—AP
See New Horizons' Best Images of Pluto
An enhanced color global view of pluto released on July 24, 2015. NASA/ReutersIn the center left of Pluto’s vast heart-shaped feature – informally named “Tombaugh Regio” - lies a vast, craterless plain that appears to be no more than 100 million years old, and is possibly still being shaped by geologic processes. This frozen region is north of Pluto’s icy mountains and has been informally named Sputnik Planum (Sputnik Plain), after Earth’s first artificial satellite. The image was acquired on July 14 from a distance of 48,000 miles (77,000 kilometers).NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research InstituteA close-up image of a region near Pluto's equator shows a range of mountains rising as high as 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft as it passed within 7,800 feet of the dwarf planet on July 14, 2015.NASA/Getty ImagesA newly discovered mountain range lies near the southwestern margin of Pluto’s heart-shaped Tombaugh Regio (Tombaugh Region), situated between bright, icy plains and dark, heavily-cratered terrain. NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research InstituteA composite image of Pluto and its largest moon Charon collected separately by New Horizons during approach on July 13 and July 14, 2015. The relative reflectivity, size, separation, and orientations of Pluto and Charon are approximated in this composite image, and they are shown in approximate true color. NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI Pluto, seen from the New Horizons spacecraft on July 13, 2015 just before the space craft's historic fly-by.NASA/APNASA's New Horizons captured this high-resolution enhanced color view of Charon just before closest approach on July 14, 2015.NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research InstituteA close up view of Pluto's largest moon, Charon.NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI Pluto on July 14, 2015, as seen by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft while it looked back toward the sun.NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
