NASA has just released a set of images of the dwarf planet Pluto taken by New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager during May 29 – June 2, 2015. These images show Pluto is a complex world with very bright and very dark terrain, and areas of intermediate brightness in between.
These images show four different ‘faces’ of the dwarf planet Pluto as it rotates about its axis with a period of 6.4 days. From left to right, the images were taken when Pluto’s central longitude was 17, 63, 130, and 243 degrees, respectively. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.
Since April 2015, images from the space probe have allowed NASA researchers to identify a wide variety of broad surface markings across the dwarf planet, including the bright area at one pole that they believe is a polar cap.
“Even though the latest images were made from more than 30 million miles away, they show an increasingly complex surface with clear evidence of discrete equatorial bright and dark regions – some that may also have variations in brightness,” says Dr Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado.
“We can also see that every face of Pluto is different and that Pluto’s northern hemisphere displays substantial dark terrains, though both Pluto’s darkest and its brightest known terrain units are just south of, or on, its equator. Why this is so is an emerging puzzle.”
Dr Hal Weaver of the Johns Hopkins University added: “we are squeezing as much information as we can out of these images, and seeing details we’ve never seen before.”
“We’ve seen evidence of light and dark spots in Hubble Space Telescope images and in previous New Horizons pictures, but these new images indicate an increasingly complex and nuanced surface.”
“Now, we want to start to learn more about what these various surface units might be and what’s causing them. By early July we will have spectroscopic data to help pinpoint that.”
New Horizons is about 2.9 billion miles (4.7 billion km) from Earth and just 24 million miles (39 million km) from the Pluto system.
