New images captured by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft have revealed a bright feature near the visible pole of the dwarf planet Pluto – a feature that could be a polar cap made of frozen molecular nitrogen ice, officials from the US space agency announced on Wednesday.
The feature, one of several dark and bright spots captured using New Horizons’ telescopic Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) camera earlier this month, appears to be brighter than its surroundings, leading scientists to believe it may be caused by a “cap” of highly reflective snow.
The images were captured from a distance of less than 70 million miles (113 million kilometers) during the early and middle parts of the month, and the polar cap hypothesis will be confirmed or disproven when the spacecraft completes a close flyby of Pluto in July, NASA said.
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