This enhanced color image of Pluto’s north polar area was taken by New Horizons’ Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera on July 14, 2015, from a distance of 21,100 miles (33,900 km).
Pluto’s north pole. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.
Huge canyons run vertically across the polar area – part of Lowell Regio, named for Percival Lowell, who founded Lowell Observatory and initiated the search that led to Pluto’s discovery.
The widest of the canyons is about 45 miles (75 km) wide and runs close to Pluto’s north pole.
Parallel subsidiary canyons to the east and west are around 6 miles (10 km) wide.
The degraded walls of these canyons appear to be much older than the more sharply defined canyon systems elsewhere on the dwarf planet, perhaps because the polar canyons are older and made of weaker material.
According to members of the New Horizons science team, these canyons represent evidence for an ancient period of tectonics.
A shallow, winding valley runs the entire length of the canyon floor. To the east of these canyons, another valley winds toward the bottom-right corner of the image.
The nearby terrain appears to have been blanketed by material that obscures small-scale topographic features.
Large, irregularly-shaped pits reach 45 miles (70 km) across and 2.5 miles (4 km) deep.
They may indicate locations where subsurface ice has melted or sublimated from below, causing the ground to collapse.
Vast canyons on Pluto’s north pole: the widest of the canyons is marked in yellow; smaller canyons are green; the valleys are blue and pink; irregularly-shaped pits are red. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.
New Horizons is currently 3.3 billion miles (5.31 billion km) from Earth and 168.3 million miles (270.9 million km) beyond Pluto, with all systems healthy and operating normally.
It is on course for a close flyby of a small Kuiper Belt object, 2014 MU69, on January 01, 2019.
