New close-up images of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft have unveiled a bewildering variety of surface features – craters, ice flows, mountains, valleys and apparent dunes – that have scientists reeling because of their range and complexity.
This synthetic perspective view of Pluto, based on the latest high-resolution images to be downlinked from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, shows what you would see if you were approximately 1,100 miles (1,800 kilometers) above Pluto’s equatorial area, looking northeast over the dark, cratered, informally named Cthulhu Regio toward the bright, smooth, expanse of icy plains informally called Sputnik Planum. The entire expanse of terrain seen in this image is 1,100 miles (1,800 kilometers) across. The images were taken as New Horizons flew past Pluto on July 14, 2015, from a distance of 50,000 miles (80,000 kilometers). (Photo courtesy: NASA)
“Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we’ve seen in the solar system,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), 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,” said Stern.
It’s complicated… Pluto’s surface, that is. New close-ups from @NASANewHorizons #PlutoFlyby: http://t.co/gAjyhdHTmZ pic.twitter.com/HVRn2SBXw9
— NASA (@NASA) September 11, 2015
New Horizons recently began its yearlong download of new images and other data.
Images downlinked in the past few days have more than doubled the amount of Pluto’s surface seen at resolutions as good as 400 meters per pixel.
They show new features as diverse as possible dunes, nitrogen ice flows that apparently oozed out of mountainous regions onto plains, and even networks of valleys that may have been carved by material flowing over Pluto’s surface.
They also show large regions that display chaotically jumbled mountains reminiscent of disrupted terrains on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa.
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