The newly-released enhanced color mosaic combines sharp pictures of Pluto from New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) taken 15 minutes before spacecraft’s closest approach to the dwarf planet on July 14 with color data from the Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera.
Wide variety of cratered, mountainous and glacial terrains seen in this enhanced color mosaic gives scientists a high-resolution window into Pluto’s geology. The top of the image is to Pluto’s northwest. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.
The LORRI images form a strip 50 miles (80 km) wide trending from Pluto’s jagged horizon about 500 miles (800 km) northwest of the huge Sputnik Planum, across the al-Idrisi mountains, onto the shoreline of Sputnik and then across its icy plains.
“The mountains bordering Sputnik Planum are absolutely stunning at this resolution,” said New Horizons team member Dr John Spencer, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
“The new details revealed here, particularly the crumpled ridges in the rubbly material surrounding several of the mountains, reinforce our earlier impression that the mountains are huge ice blocks that have been jostled and tumbled and somehow transported to their present locations.”
“Impact craters are nature’s drill rigs, and the new, highest-resolution pictures of the bigger craters seem to show that Pluto’s icy crust, at least in places, is distinctly layered,” added team member Dr William McKinnon, of Washington University in St. Louis.
“Looking into Pluto’s depths is also looking back into geologic time, which will help us piece together Pluto’s geological history.”
“Nothing of this quality was available for Venus or Mars until decades after their first flybys,” said New Horizons principal investigator Dr Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute.
Mountainous shoreline of Sputnik Planum: in this enhanced color image, great blocks of Pluto’s water-ice crust appear jammed together in al-Idrisi mountains. Some mountain sides appear coated in dark material, while other sides are bright. Several sheer faces appear to show crustal layering, perhaps related to the layers seen in some of Pluto’s crater walls. The mountains end abruptly at the shoreline of Sputnik Planum, where exotic ices of the plain form a nearly level surface, broken only by the fine trace work of striking, cellular boundaries and the textured surface of the plain’s ices. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.
New Horizons is currently 3.26 billion miles (5.25 billion km) from Earth and 110.6 million miles (178 million km) beyond Pluto. It is on course for a close flyby of the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 in 2019.
