{"id":19393,"date":"2016-05-06T21:49:28","date_gmt":"2016-05-06T13:49:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/whats-new-from-new-horizons-clean-water-ice-on-plutos-far-out-moon-hydra\/"},"modified":"2016-05-06T21:49:28","modified_gmt":"2016-05-06T13:49:28","slug":"whats-new-from-new-horizons-clean-water-ice-on-plutos-far-out-moon-hydra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/whats-new-from-new-horizons-clean-water-ice-on-plutos-far-out-moon-hydra\/","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s new from New Horizons: Clean water ice on Pluto\u2019s far-out moon, Hydra"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"An
An image captured during the New Horizons flyby in July 2015 shows Hydra, Pluto\u2019s outermost moon. (Credit: NASA \/ JHUAPL \/ SwRI)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

If you\u2019re looking for a place to chip off an ice cube for a cool interplanetary drink, you can\u2019t do much better than Hydra, Pluto\u2019s outermost moon.<\/p>\n

Newly released readings from NASA\u2019s New Horizons mission reveal that Hydra\u2019s surface is dominated by nearly pristine frozen water. It\u2019s significantly purer than the mixed-up ice on the surface of Pluto \u2013 or even the water ice found on the surface on Charon, Pluto\u2019s biggest moon.<\/p>\n

The findings are drawn from the first compositional data relating to Pluto\u2019s four smaller moons, including Hydra as well as Nix, Styx and Kerberos. The infrared spectral readings were acquired almost 10 months ago, when the piano-sized New Horizons spacecraft flew past the Plutonian system. But the data had to stay stored in the onboard computer\u2019s memory until only recently.<\/p>\n

About half of the data from the flyby has been sent back so far, and it will take months longer to send back the rest \u2013 including the readings for Pluto\u2019s other small moons.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not surprising that there\u2019s water ice on Hydra. The moon is thought to have been formed from the lighter pieces of a debris disk that was created when an icy object slammed into a proto-Pluto billions of years ago.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s still a mystery for scientists to puzzle over: Why is the stuff on Hydra\u2019s surface so much purer than the water ice on Charon?<\/p>\n

\u201cPerhaps micrometeorite impacts continually refresh the surface of Hydra by blasting off contaminants,\u201d Simon Porter, a New Horizons science team member from the Southwest Research Institute, said in a science update issued Thursday, \u201cThis process would have been ineffective on the much larger Charon, whose much stronger gravity retains any debris created by these impacts.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Charon
New compositional data from NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft reveal a distinct water-ice signature on the surface of Pluto\u2019s outermost moon, Hydra. The water is purer than it is on the surface of Charon, Pluto\u2019s largest moon. Click on the image for a larger version. (Credit: NASA \/ JHUAPL \/ SwRI)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The hubbub over Hydra is just the latest in a string of findings from the New Horizons team. Here are some additional nuggets:<\/p>\n

    \n
  • Pluto behaves less like a comet than expected and more like Mars or Venus in the way it interacts with the solar wind. Readings from New Horizons show that the solar wind, a continuous stream of electrically charged particles from the sun, is diverted around Pluto more abruptly than expected. Like Earth, Pluto has a long tail of heavy ion that extends \u201cdownwind\u201d to a distance of at least 73,800 miles. The findings were published this week in the Journal of Geophysical Research \u2013 Space Physics.<\/li>\n
  • The New Horizons team issued an updated global map of Pluto that incorporates the highest-resolution imagery currently available. There\u2019s also a new elevation map showing that part of Pluto\u2019s heart-shaped region, known as Sputnik Planum, is on average 2 miles lower than the surrounding terrain.<\/li>\n
  • Other imagery captured during the flyby highlights several dozen \u201chalo\u201d craters in a region of Pluto known as Vega Terra. A comparison of the image with compositional data suggests that the floors of the craters and the terrain between them contain water ice, but that methane ice has settled on the rims and walls of the crater. It\u2019s not yet known why.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    An image captured during the New Horizons flyby in July 2015 shows Hydra, Pluto\u2019s outermost moon. (Credit: NASA \/ JHUAPL \/ SwRI) If you\u2019re looking for a place to chip off an ice cube for a cool interplanetary drink, you can\u2019t do much better than Hydra, Pluto\u2019s outermost moon. Newly released readings from NASA\u2019s New […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3894,4809,2174,4810,2848],"class_list":["post-19393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-hydra","tag-nasa-new-horizons","tag-new-horizons","tag-new-horizons-probe","tag-pluto"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19393"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19393\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}