NASA's New Horizons spacecraft’s latest released data has pointed towards more prevalent water ice on the surface of Pluto than thought earlier.

A false colored picture obtained from observations in infrared light by the Ralph/Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA) instrument has shown the parts where the spectral features of water ice are in abundance on the surface of Pluto.

The image is based on two LEISA scans of the dwarf planet derived on July 14, 2015, from a range of nearly 67,000 miles.

Both the scans have been taken at a difference of nearly 15 minutes, and were stitched into a combined multispectral Pluto ‘data cube’ that covered the full hemisphere evident to New Horizons when it flew past the dwarf planet. This type of data cube is a three-dimensional array wherein a picture of Pluto is created at each LEISA-sensitive wavelength.

Water ice is called the crustal ‘bedrock’ of Pluto on which its more volatile ice draws their seasonally changing patterns. The final map has been achieved after initial New Horizons maps of water ice bedrock on Pluto compared LEISA spectra with a pure water ice template spectrum.

The technique has a drawback that methane ice easily masks water ice's spectral signature so that map was just sensitive to sites that were mainly rich in water ice and/or depleted in methane.

The other method used is quite more sensitive, involving modeling the contributions of various ices of Pluto all together. The second method also has a flaw that it can just map the ices included in the model, however, the team has been continually adding more data, making the model better.

The new map has come up with a significant discovery that shows exposed water ice to be notably more widespread throughout the surface of the dwarf planet than was previously known.