NASA has released new close-up images of Pluto taken by the New Horizons spacecraft, revealing intricate surface features in striking clarity.
The pictures show old, heavily cratered terrain as well as younger, crater-free icy plains.
“Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we’ve seen in the solar system,” says New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado.
“If an artist had painted this Pluto before our flyby, I probably would have called it over the top — but that’s what is actually there.”
“The surface of Pluto is every bit as complex as that of Mars,” says Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.
“The randomly jumbled mountains might be huge blocks of hard water ice floating within a vast, denser, softer deposit of frozen nitrogen within the region informally named Sputnik Planum.”
This mosaic of images is dominated by Sputnik Planum, the icy region visible across the centre. The mosaic covers a region about 1,600km wide and was taken from a distance of 80,000km on 14 July 2015.
This 470km wide image shows broken terrain on the northwestern edge of Sputnik Planum, to the right.
The diversity of Pluto’s surface is visible in this shot, showing the various surfaces and landforms on the dwarf planet. This 350km wide image shows cratered terrain, mountains and a field of dark ridges that look like dunes.
Pluto's moon Charon. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Here we can see Pluto’s atmospheric haze producing a twilight illuminating the surface before sunrise and after sunset. The right image has been brightened to highlight the details beyond Pluto’s terminator.
This image shows two different version of Pluto’s haze layers, taken almost 16 hours after close approach from a distance of 770,000km. Pluto’s north is at the top of the image, while the Sun’s rays can be seen illuminating the dwarf planet from the upper right.
Iain Todd is BBC Sky at Night Magazine's Content Editor. He fell in love with the night sky when he caught his first glimpse of Orion, aged 10.
The diversity of Pluto’s surface is visible in this shot, showing the various surfaces and landforms on the dwarf planet. This 350km wide image shows cratered terrain, mountains and a field of dark ridges that look like dunes.
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