New Horizons captured images of Pluto rotating over the course of a full “Pluto day” as it approached the dwarf planet on course to its closest flyby. Lower resolution colour data (at about 2,066 feet, or 630 metres, per pixel) were added to create this new image. The pictures have a resolution of 250-280 feet per pixel resolution and reveal the features of a section of the Pluto landscape no bigger than a city block.
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We’re learning more about what Pluto looks like.
For more information about the New Horizons mission and to learn a bit more bout Pluto, visit NASA’s website.
The pics represent the highest-resolution images ever obtained of a series of pits which scar the surface of Tombaugh Regio.
The LORRI image of the shoreline of the Sputnik Planum. More exactly, they feature the al-Idrisi mountains, made of icy water, the Sputnik Planum that is so rich in nitrogen and Pluto’s icy plains. “The science we can do with these images is simply unbelievable”.
“Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we have seen in the solar system”, said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado. It’s a region which, based on the relative sparsity of impact sites, is believed to be extremely young in geological terms. The pits on Tombaugh Regio are each hundreds of yards across and 10 or more yards deep.
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NASA said the pits shown in the images could be a result of ice fracturing and evaporation on the dwarf planet. Just like images of Pluto, New Horizons captured images of Charon using the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) and the Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera from July 7-13.
