Each new set of images has revealed new details, and now NASA is releasing the highest-resolution pictures ever taken by the spacecraft during its brief but historic flyby of Pluto. “Impact craters are nature’s drill rigs, and the new, highest-resolution pictures of the bigger craters seem to show that Pluto’s icy crust, at least in places, is distinctly layered”, said William McKinnon, deputy lead of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team, from Washington University in St. Louis. At its closest approach, which occurred 15 minutes after the images were captured, New Horizons came within about 7,800 miles (12,550 km) of the dwarf planet.
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The high-resolution images were captured by the New Horizons probe during this summer’s flyby.
“Yet at Pluto we are there already – down among the craters, mountains and ice fields – less than five months after fly-by!”
There are still many more images yet to be sent back to Earth from New Horizons at this resolution quality while the space craft continues traveling toward the Kuiper Belt.
ANALYSIS: After Pluto, Where Will NASA’s New Horizons Go? With this resolution, the mountains becoming incredibly stunning, says New Horizons’ John Spencer.
The images were taken with New Horizons’ long-range camera when the probe was 10,000 miles from the dwarf planet’s surface. You can see the images in this dazzling flyover video from NASA, which was stitched together by mission team members.
The images are part of a 50-mile-wide strip starting at Pluto’s horizon that stretches across intriguingly cratered terrain, the jumbled al-Idrisi mountains, the shoreline-like boundary between the mountains and the heart-shaped region known as Sputnik Planum and on across its icy plains. “The science we can do with these images is simply unbelievable”, affirmed Stern. One image features Pluto’s rugged Idrisi mountains about 500 miles northwest of the informally named Sputnik Planum, located on the side of Pluto’s well-known heart feature. These features are a huge asset to scientists hoping to piece together Pluto’s geologic past.
New Horizons team hopes to learn about Pluto’s geological past from the new data.
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More high-resolution images are expected in over the next few days.
