Tiny Pluto Big On Frozen Water Reserves

New submitter rmdingler writes that a new map created by NASA based on the New Horizons flyby of Pluto "shows much more frozen water than scientists initially expected." Using LEISA to photograph from 108,000 kilometers away, much more of the recently demoted planet's frozen surface liquid is water, rather than methane, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen as originally posited.

Comments

Amazing that it is not buried

[jfdavis668]

Water freezes at a much higher temperature than many of the other compounds. You think it would have frozen first and be buried under everything else. Some action must bring it back up and deposit it on the surface.

Re:Amazing that it is not buried

[BarbaraHudson]

Read the article - much of it is buried under frozen methane, nitrogen, etc.

Re:Amazing that it is not buried

[Rei]

The summary is lousy. It's not "much less water ice than thought", it's much less "than was previously known". It had been hard to detect the water ice through the frosts previously.

It's always been expected that a large portion of Pluto's mass is water ice. Also, it was well known before NH arrived that any surface topography of significance would have to be from water ice, as the other ices are just too "soft" to hold up strong contours.

As for water ice being buried, why would you expect that? Water ice is lighter than nitrogen and carbon monoxide ices. It basically "floats" on them. There seems to be a sort of N2/CO/CH4 "mantle" which is exposed to the surface (and convecting) at Sputnik (the point nearest Charon). Elsewhere, however, a water ice crust floats atop it, seemingly progressively thicker the further one gets from Sputnik/Charon.

I find it interesting - perhaps coincidental, perhaps not - that Pluto is like our moon, with a crust thinner and more geologically active on the side of which it's tidally locked to its partner, and thicker/less active on the opposite side. If we can figure out Pluto's dynamics better, it might help us understand our own moon better.

Pluto is a beautifully, fascinatingly weird place. There's some good evidence that entire water-ice floating mountains have washed ashore and collected on the shores of Sputnik - perhaps water ice from the deep depths. Certainly there are shorelines that have this appearance today, and we can see smaller water-ice chunks floating and stuck between the roiling convection cells. If one pictures rolling back the clock, Pluto started out very hot (alternatively with multiple periods of heat, such as during the formation and/or capture of Charon). The first things to condense out would have been rocks, such as silicates, with a water ice ocean and a nitrogen/methane/CO atmosphere. Then the water ice would have frozen. Then the gases would have frozen atop it. But then you have a situation where you have an extensive heavier layer over an even more extensive, lighter layer. So there may be potential for cycling. But it's hard to say, because different crystal forms in different temperature and pressure conditions have different densities.

Charon also has a look of large chunks of water ice drifting around. But while Pluto has its active mantle exposed to space, Charon seems frozen in time. You can see structures that look like massive islands (or even continents) that have broken off from each other, drifted, then became frozen into place. And there's some crazy-massive rifting, as if some layers changed dramatically in size relative to others as they froze (Pluto too has rifting, but Charon's rifts are even more spectacular)

Consumables

[Applehu Akbar]

In space we seem to be finding water, water everywhere. And hydrocarbons, popping up in the most unexpected parts of the solar system. By the time our robots have mapped everything out, there won't be anything we will need to haul up from the terrestrial gravity well besides ourselves and the first iteration of tools-to-make-the-tools.

Re:Consumables

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah uhm, distance still matters. Logistics don't go away because you are in reduced gravity. It'll still be cheaper to ship water from Earth to LEO than to bring it there from Pluto. Only a few probes have ever been out that far.

Re:Consumables

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think the parent was talking about bringing things to LEO, but rather—if we go to around Pluto, we won't need to launch much from Earth itself.

Re:Consumables

[hey!]

That's how I read it.

Most of the science fiction-y things people imagine doing outside the immediate vicinity of the Earth (e.g. mining the asteroid belt) are dependent upon two things becoming much cheaper: moving things around, and generating energy (almost certainly nuclear if we're talking about doing stuff with trans-Neptunian objects). It's fairly certain that nothing very exciting other than science will get done outside the immediate vicinity of the Earth until those things become a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper. After they do, all bets are off because people will do just about anything for the hell of it if it's not prohibitively expensive.

Re:Consumables

[rgmoore]

It shouldn't be that surprising to see water and methane everywhere. After all, hydrogen is by far the most common element in the universe, and oxygen and carbon are also relatively common. Simple compounds of heavier elements with hydrogen should be among the most common things to see on planets (and dwarf planets and moons) that don't have strong enough gravity to keep hydrogen in their atmosphere.

Re:Consumables

[stevelinton]

The comment is a about the general frequency of water. For Earth if you want a lot of water, Ceres or a well-chosen comet seem like the best choices at the moment, with the craters at the South pole of the Moon a bit of a long-shot. If you just need a few tons you may as well send it up from Earth. Finding water in the outer system is not a surprise, but finding so much on Mars and Ceres was a bit unexpected.

Re:Consumables

[plopez]

We simply transport the water from Pluto to Mars. Like duh! how hard can that be?

(In case you missed it that was sarcasm)

Re:Consumables

[NEDHead]

That direction is downhill...

Re:Consumables

[arth1]

After all, hydrogen is by far the most common element in the universe, and oxygen and carbon are also relatively common.

Hydrogen is only around 3% of the universe, and growing scarcer all the time.
And of normal baryonic matter, anything heavier than helium is really rare.

Re: Consumables

[Anonymous Coward]

It is still by far the most common element, even if it is only about 3.7% of the mass-energy content, and the rate change is insignificant on human history timescales.

Re:Consumables

[Rei]

We've known that water is one of the most common components of the universe, and the most dominant compound of the outer solar system, for over a century.

Re:Consumables

[Applehu Akbar]

I am not suggesting moving water for Pluto to any distant place, only thatPluto is yet another handy place where it can be found.

Water for Mars will come from those handy snowballs that keep whizzing past the inner planets. Identify one going in basically the right direction, and nudge its eccentric orbital ellipse to collide with one limb of the planet.

Re:Consumables

[thinkwaitfast]

tools-to-make-the-tools

humans got to today's level of technology starting with sticks and rocks for tools. The big jump however came with the lathe. Using a lathe, you can either build any tool known to man or the tool used to build any known tool known to man (a wafer processing machine for example). You can even construct a first lathe using nothing more than some hand tools and a drill.

Re:Consumables

[Anonymous Coward]

and there's a Walmart on Uranus.

Re:Consumables

[Anonymous Coward]

Your definition of "handy" is .. interesting, to say the least. You sound like a shut-in who's mapping the future of the human species for the next billion years.

Re:Consumables

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a programmer, aren't you?

Re:Consumables

[plopez]

Could you post some calculations and a plan on how to do that? Perhaps using Halley's comet as an example as it's period is very "handy"?

Re:Consumables

[Applehu Akbar]

Because comets are fragile, you would want to attach a high specific impulse, low thrust device like an ion engine. The key factor is lead time; given enough of it, you can divert practically anything.

Re:Consumables

[Hognoxious]

Sod that. Blast it to fuck and hope one of the fragments goes where you want it.

Re:Consumables

[plopez]

Which is the basic principle behind gene canons.

Re:Consumables

[plopez]

Computations please. A simulation would be nice too.

DHMO danger!

[Megane]

Clearly it is time to designate Pluto as a superfund site now that we have found such large quantities of dihydrogen monoxide on it.

Let's get that water!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

For Flint, Michigan!!

frozen water is not a liquid

[BarbaraHudson]

From the summary:

planet's frozen surface liquid is water, rather than methane, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen as originally posited.

Dump the word liquid. It's both stupid and wrong.

Re:frozen water is not a liquid

[BarbaraHudson]

And before anyone gets on my case, the word "liquid" is nowhere to be found in the original article.

Re:frozen water is not a liquid

[jeffb (2.718)]

I would've been willing to let it slide if they'd continued with "as opposed to Earth or the Moon, where most of the solid surface consists of frozen liquid silicates". Of course, then they might have realized how goofy it sounded.

Re:frozen water is not a liquid

[Anonymous Coward]

The word water in and of itself is actually a liquid form of H20. Perhaps they were attempting to put something in layman's terms? Anyhow, are you implying that one may be stupid and correct, or intelligent and wrong?

Re:frozen water is not a liquid

[BarbaraHudson]

As I pointed out directly under my post, the word "liquid" does not occur anywhere in the article. It was added by whoever submitted the summary. And no, water can be in gaseous, liquid, or solid states.

Re:frozen water is not a liquid

[Anonymous Coward]

No, otherwise, we'd also have to rethink things like "dry heat" or shouldn't we call it like we see it like 'cowadunga' instaed of the fancy latin name methane

Re:frozen water is not a liquid

[BarbaraHudson]

No, "dry heat" means heat with little or no moisture, so no relabeling necessary. H2O exists as a solid (we call it ice, but it's still the chemical H2O), liquid (we call it water, but it's also still the chemical H2O) and gas (vapor but still H2O). However, if it's frozen, it's frozen water, not a liquid.

Re:frozen water is not a liquid

[RyanWebb]

Water can BECOME a VAPOUR. We call that steam. :)

Re:frozen water is not a liquid

[BarbaraHudson]

Gaseous water doesn't have to just be steam. Think of how hot it feels on a humid day. That's not steam, because it would condense out into water droplets when it hit air below the boiling point, creating the "steam clouds" (which are actually liquid water condensate) that we associate with steam.

Re:frozen water is not a liquid

[Anonymous Coward]

From dictionary.com: Water:
1.a transparent, odorless, tasteless LIQUID, a compound of hydrogen and oxygen, H 2 O, freezing at 32F or 0C and boiling at 212F or 100C, that in a more or less impure state constitutes rain, oceans, lakes, rivers, etc.: it contains 11.188 percent hydrogen and 88.812 percent oxygen, by weight.
2.a special form or variety of this LIQUID, as rain.

Steam: noun
1. water in the form of an invisible gas or vapor.
2. water changed to this form by boiling, extensively used for the generation of mechanical power, for heating purposes, etc.
3. the mist formed when the gas or vapor from boiling water condenses in the air.

Of course water vapour in the atmosphere isn't pure steam. As noted in wikipedia: "Whenever a water molecule leaves a surface and diffuses into a surrounding gas, it is said to have evaporated. Each individual water molecule which transitions between a more associated (liquid) and a less associated (vapor/gas) state does so through the absorption or release of kinetic energy. The aggregate measurement of this kinetic energy transfer is defined as thermal energy and occurs only when there is differential in the temperature of the water molecules. Liquid water that becomes water vapor takes a parcel of heat with it, in a process called evaporative cooling.[5] "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_vapor

That doesn't make "water" = "steam," however.

Re:frozen water is not a liquid

[BarbaraHudson]

And when it freezes, it's no longer a liquid, is it? Duh! Frozen water is NOT a "frozen liquid", it's a solid. Frozen h2o is an ice. Liquid h2o is water. Gaseous h2o is a gas. Only one of these can be described as a liquid. The submitter added the phrase "frozen liquid" to the summary, a phrase that does not exist in the original article.

The problem arises from using a common term (water) to describe a chemical (h20).

Water

[ledow]

Does rather call into question the surveys we do of foreign systems.

I mean, if we were surprised by how much water Pluto has, and Mars has recently changed in our opinion several times too, how we can pretend we're measuring the potential atmospheres or compositions of just about anything outside the solar system with any degree of accuracy?

We have things SITTING on Mars and we're still not sure. So should we really be playing such guessing games at all?

Re:Water

[sumdumass]

This is science! Every fact is fact until it is not fact or the fact means something different that the fact meant previously. If you don't like that fact, stick with your religions. We are dealing with the truth here.

Re:Water

[rmdingler]

Often, scientific progress is achieved by the advancement of the accuracy of your underlying tenets.

Re:Water

[XXongo]

I mean, if we were surprised by how much water Pluto has, and Mars has recently changed in our opinion several times too, how we can pretend we're measuring the potential atmospheres or compositions of just about anything outside the solar system with any degree of accuracy?

The answer is, we haven't. There are proposals to measure atmospheres of exoplanets, but except for very exceptional cases, we haven't.

There was never any question that Pluto had large amounts of water ice. All the small bodies we've seen in the outer solar system have-- and Uranus and Neptune are pretty much made of water-- so it's not a surprise Pluto has water ice. The only question is whether the water ice was buried under other stuff.

Re:Water

[Rei]

The summary is wrong. There is no surprise about how much water ice Pluto has, it's always been expected that it's predominantly water ice.

The actual article linked says that the maps show more water ice than was previously known, not than previously thought. It's hard to see through the surface frosts to see the water ice. Mountains are impossible on Pluto without water ice (or other high compressive strength material - aka, not N2, CH4, CO, etc). The instant mountains were seen, we knew that the crust was mostly water ice. And even before then, we knew that - regardless of what its crust was made of - that Pluto is in large part water ice, due to its density (1,86g/cm3).

Re:Water

[solartear]

Cherry-pick the best possible cases for the latter among the billions of local stars and one can be found. Huge difference between measuring the solid surface and subsurface composition of a very dimly lit object versus measuring how a very strong light changes when going through a gaseous atmosphere.

Just to clarify this

[NotSoHeavyD3]

Current understanding is that matter is under 5% of the universe and the vast majority of that is hydrogen. from Wikipedia on hydrogen

Its monatomic form (H) is the most abundant chemical substance in the Universe, constituting roughly 75% of all baryonic mass.

The vast majority of the universe is thought to be composed of dark energy and dark matter, whatever those are.

Hydrogen and Dark matter

[XXongo]

After all, hydrogen is by far the most common element in the universe, and oxygen and carbon are also relatively common.

Hydrogen is only around 3% of the universe, and growing scarcer all the time.

Two different things. Hydrogen comprises 75% by mass of the elements in the universe. http://www.webelements.com/per...

If you are saying it's only 3% of the universe, you must be including dark matter. But that's not an element.

Planets don't, in general, contain dark matter, so the abundance of hydrogen relative to dark matter isn't really relevant to the amount of water found on Pluto and other solar system objects.

Just don't tell the Americans

[Anonymous Coward]

They'll want to go there and execute a regeime change.