NASA’s New Horizons team has released a series of breathtaking new images of Pluto’s surface, giving planetary researchers a high resolution window to the dwarf planet’s geology.
This image from New Horizons reveals new details of Pluto’s rugged, icy cratered plains. Notice the layering in the interior walls of many craters. The darker crater in the lower center is apparently younger than the others, because dark material ejected from within has not been erased and can still be made out. The origin of the many dark linear features trending roughly vertically in the bottom half of the image is under debate, but may be tectonic. Most of the craters seen here lie within the 155-mile (250-km)-wide Burney Basin, whose outer rim or ring forms the line of hills or low mountains at bottom. The basin is named after Venetia Burney, the English schoolgirl who first proposed the name Pluto for the newly discovered planet in 1930. The top of the image is to Pluto’s northwest. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.
These latest images of Pluto were made with New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager over a timespan of about a minute centered on 11:36 GMT on July 14, 2015, – just 15 minutes before New Horizons’ closest approach to the dwarf planet – from a range of 10,000 miles (17,000 km).
“These close-up images, showing the diversity of terrain on Pluto, demonstrate the power of our robotic planetary explorers to return intriguing data to scientists back here on planet Earth,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
“New Horizons thrilled us during the July flyby with the first close images of Pluto, and as the spacecraft transmits the treasure trove of images in its onboard memory back to us, we continue to be amazed by what we see.”
In this image of Pluto’s surface, great blocks of 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. This view is about 50 miles (80.5 km) wide. The top of the image is to Pluto’s northwest. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.
The new images include a wide variety of cratered, mountainous and glacial terrains. They form a strip 50 miles (80 km) wide trending from planet’s horizon about 500 miles (800 km) northwest of the huge ice plain Sputnik Planum, across the al-Idrisi mountains, onto the shoreline of Sputnik Planum.
“Nothing of this quality was available for Venus or Mars until decades after their first flybys,” said Dr Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, principal investigator for New Horizons.
“Yet at Pluto we’re there already – down among the craters, mountains and ice fields – less than five months after flyby! The science we can do with these images is simply unbelievable.”
This image of Pluto’s surface shows how erosion and faulting has sculpted this portion of the dwarf planet’s icy crust into rugged badlands. The prominent 1.2-mile (2 km) high cliff at the top, running from left to upper right, is part of a great canyon system that stretches for hundreds of miles across Pluto’s northern hemisphere. At the bottom of this image, the terrain transforms into a fractured and finely broken up floor at the northwest margin of Sputnik Planum. The top of the image is to Pluto’s northwest. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.
New Horizons is currently 3.25 billion miles (5.23 billion km) from Earth and 108 million miles (174 million km) beyond Pluto. It is healthy and all systems are operating normally.
The spacecraft is on course for a close flyby of a Kuiper Belt object, known as 2014 MU69, on January 1, 2019.
