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By Jason Snell for Yahoo
This Week in Space: Weird Pluto and No Plan for Mars
We’re lucky to have Pluto. If people in the early 20th century hadn’t mistakenly thought Pluto was a major planet, much larger than it actually turned out to be, we might have declared it a boring icy body of the outer solar system and not gone to the trouble of sending the New Horizons probe to fly past it.
And we would mean we’d have missed out on the real Pluto — a beautiful icy body that continues to offer surprises months after New Horizons flew past it. This week, yet more new data from New Horizons revealed that Pluto has more water than originally thought. Water on Pluto isn’t like any water on earth: It’s so cold out there that it’s ice as hard as a rock.