New Horizons Mission Helps NASA Discover Hints Of Clouds On Pluto

Researchers from the New Horizons mission claim to have spotted some cloud candidates on the dwarf planet, Pluto, after careful examination of images captured during the spacecraft's flight through the planet system in July 2015. The spacecraft has nearly finished its 16-month send-off from Pluto and its next destination is in the distant ring in the Solar System, said NASA scientists on Tuesday.

"We're excited about the exploration ahead for New Horizons, and also about what we are still discovering from Pluto flyby data," stated Alan Stern, the principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. He added that Pluto's complex and layered atmosphere is hazy and it seems to be mostly free of clouds. However, the research team has identified few potential clouds in the images captured by New Horizon's cameras.

"If there are clouds, it would mean the weather on Pluto is even more complex than we imagined," Stern said. Scientists are well aware of the fact that Pluto's icy surface below that atmosphere varies widely in brightness. Accoring to The Indian Express, these findings are based on the telescopic observations.

Last year, researchers had discovered that Pluto has 'layers of strange hazes towering' 200km in the sky, but they did not see any swirling storms that cover gas giants. On Tuesday, Stern explained that NASA has found around 7 candidates for clouds, each of them being quite suggestive of a probable yet rare condensation cloud on Pluto. However, none of them could be confirmed as a cloud right away as they are lying very close to the surface of Pluto, and can not be reached by New Horizons' instruments.

"The first flyby has given us a fantastic taste of a very dynamic and changing environment, but it's not enough," Stern said. "In order to confirm we would have to go back with more instrumentation and more time."

The spacecraft has already sent back a large amount of data back to the researchers that will be downloaded by Sunday from Pluto's first flyby, almost a year and a half after New Horizons became the first ever manmade spacecraft to visit and explore the dwarf planet system of Pluto.

According to reports, New Horizons is now on its way to MU69, another celestial object in the belt, and programmed to come within 3,000 km of it around the New Years Day of 2019.