“These new images give us a breathtaking, super-high resolution window into Pluto’s geology”, said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado.
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These images are six times better than the resolution of the global Pluto map New Horizons obtained, and five times better than the best images of Pluto’s cousin Triton, Neptune’s large moon – received from Voyager 2 in 1989, says Nasa.
The images, taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, show craters, mountains and glacial terrain along a strip 50 miles (80 kilometers) wide.
These were taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft last July 14, News.com.au wrote. The latest snaps are the highest-resolution images gathered by the spacecraft during its July flyby, and in revealing craters, mountains and glaciers, may be the sharpest close-ups humans will lay eyes on for decades. As it’s unlikely that another Pluto-centric mission will occur anytime soon, we can basically assume that these are the most detailed images many of us will ever see of the alien world. Instead of the standard “point and shoot”, the sensor captured images every three seconds while the surface of Pluto was being scanned.
“Looking into Pluto’s depths is also looking back into geologic time, which will help us piece together Pluto’s geological history”.
The area seen in the images is a section of Pluto informally names Sputnik Planum and shows some of the al-Idrisi Mountains.
The images were taken with the LORRI telescope.
Pluto’s Badlands: Erosion and faulting has sculpted portions of Pluto’s icy crust into rugged badlands.
The individual images were taken by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) over approximately a minute just 15 minutes before closest approach. They appear to actually be massive blocks of ice, which “have been jostled and tumbled and somehow transported to their present locations”. It is expected to leave Pluto behind and go into the regions beyond the solar system.
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Science team member John Spencer described the al-Idrisi mountains as “absolutely stunning”. Traveling at 32,000 miles per hour, New Horizons is now 104 million miles (167 million kilometers) beyond Pluto.
