Following its "major announcement" regarding Mars last week, NASA teased earlier this week that is had another major announcement, but this time it was about the Dwarf Planet, Pluto.
NASA just unveiled its first colored pictures of a bright blue haze that encompasses Pluto, along with more photos of water ice patches on the same planet.
"Who would have expected a blue sky in the Kuiper Belt? It's gorgeous," said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado.
The blue haze in the photos - taken by the New Horizons Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) - gives scientists the opportunity to discern on how it is actually made.
"That striking blue tint tells us about the size and composition of the haze particles," said science team researcher Carly Howett, also from SwRI.
"A blue sky often results from scattering of sunlight by very small particles. On Earth, those particles are very tiny nitrogen molecules. On Pluto they appear to be larger - but still relatively small - soot-like particles we call tholins," she added.
In addition, NASA also said that they found small, exposed patches of ice on Pluto. The bits of ice correlate with the previously seen red patches on the surface, but scientists still don't know why.
"I'm surprised that this water ice is so red," said science team member from the University of Maryland, College Park Silvia Protopapa. "We don't yet understand the relationship between water ice and the reddish tholin colorants on Pluto's surface."
Science team member of SwRI Jason Cook explains how scientists plan to explore how the patches of ice actually form and why they appear as such:
"Large expanses of Pluto don't show exposed water ice because it's apparently masked by other, more volatile ices across most of the planet. Understanding why water appears exactly where it does, and not in other places, is a challenge that we are digging into."
Watch the video from Independent UK below.
