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Tiny Pluto Big On Frozen Water Reserves

Posted by timothy on from the let's-take-a-look-at-those-pictures dept.

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.

3 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. Consumables by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Consumables by thinkwaitfast · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  2. Hydrogen and Dark matter by XXongo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.