Recently, employees of the NASA space agency published on the official website a map of Pluto's water ice obtained by the automatic interplanetary station New Horizons. Scientists have concluded that such a large amount of hydrogen oxide could mean that there is life on the planet's surface.
NASA employees mistakenly used the wrong filter when filming Pluto. As a result, only frozen methane was recorded in the blue spectrum, of which there is very little on the planet, and water ice was not displayed in the image. It was only after using the LEISA infrared video spectrometer that researchers were able to make sure that there is almost as much frozen water on Pluto as there is rocks.
From a distance of 180 thousand kilometers, New Horizons recorded that the amount of ice is approximately 50% of the entire surface of the planet, and the abundance of hydrogen oxide, according to NASA, allows the development of life. According to the plans of scientists, in 2019 the automatic station will reach the MU69 planetoid in the Kuiper belt, located 1.6 billion kilometers from Pluto.
Elena Razumovskaya