Images downlinked in recent days have more than doubled the amount of Pluto’s surface seen at resolutions up to 440 yards per pixel, according to NASA.
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The photos, released by NASA Thursday, were snapped at an altitude of about 11,000 miles, just after New Horizons passed behind Pluto.
Zooming further reveals a low-lying fog illuminated by the setting Sun.
This isn’t our last look at Pluto from New Horizons.
“This image really makes you feel you are there, at Pluto, surveying the landscape for yourself”, Alan Stern, New Horizons’ principal investigator, said in a statement.
Pluto has again stunned researchers in the latest pictures downloaded from NASA’s New Horizons probe.
Images returned have also revealed that Pluto’s global atmospheric haze has many more layers than scientists realised, and that the haze actually creates a twilight effect that softly illuminates night-side terrain near sunset, making them visible to the cameras aboard New Horizons. “The smooth expanse of the informally named icy plain Sputnik Planum (right) is flanked to the west (left) by rugged mountains up to 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) high, including the informally named Norgay Montes in the foreground and Hillary Montes on the skyline”.
Scientists say the “fog” provides further evidence for the equivalent on Pluto of Earth’s water-cycle, but involving exotic types of ice.
“Driven by dim sunlight, this would be directly comparable to the hydrological cycle that feeds ice caps on Earth, where water is evaporated from the oceans, falls as snow, and returns to the seas through glacial flow”, explained Alan Howard, a team member from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
Making a comparison between Pluto and earth, experts also commented why some of the planets features are “surprisingly earth-like”. The spacecraft has collected so much data it will take 16 months to send it all back to Earth.
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The images were captured by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) onboard New Horizons. There might even be a field of dark wind-blown dunes, among other possibilities.
