Photos from NASA spacecraft show Pluto covered in water ice

The US space agency NASA recently released a first look of Pluto’s atmosphere in infrared wavelengths.

Making up Pluto’s crustal bedrock, “the canvas on which its more volatile ices paint their seasonally changing patterns” according to NASA, the solid H2O can be seen in a “combined multispectral “data cube” covering the full hemisphere” based on two LEISA scans taken fifteen minutes apart last June from a distance of 67,000 miles away, Astronomy magazine reports.

The brand new infrared picture, when coupled with earlier pictures created at shorter wavelengths, provides fresh hints into the size distribution of the contaminants to researchers.

New maps released by NASA have showed that the dwarf planet has more water ice than previously thought.

The latest results indicate Pluto has more water ice than previously thought, scientists said.

With the discovery of more water ice and ice volcanoes on the planet have made some scientists to think that there might be a global ocean beneath its icy surface that is comparable to the Enceldaus moon of Saturn.

New Horizons is also still beaming home the many photos and measurements it captured during the July 14 flyby.

New Horizons is now zooming toward a small object about 1 billion miles (1.6 billion km) beyond Pluto called 2014 MU69.

It turns out water ice is more prevalent on Pluto than expected, but it is still absent from large regions such as the vast plains informally named Sputnik Planum on the western lobe of the dwarf planet’s famous heart-shaped feature. Rather the Sputnik Planum has very big glaciers, but all of them are composed of methane, nitrogen and carbon monoxide ice.

Before New Horizons zipped by Pluto a year ago, telescopic observations from Earth showed the faraway world to be rich in nitrogen.

“The fact that even cold, distant Pluto could have a subsurface ocean means that there are potential habitats even in apparently unpromising locations”, New Horizons scientist Francis Nimmo told Smithsonian magazine in January.