New Images Provide Best View of Pluto Yet

From icy craters with cracked layers and rugged badlands to the al-Idrisi mountains, Pluto’s surface still holds many mysteries for scientists. And with an array of new close-up images sent from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, humans are now closer to the surface than ever before.

Last week, New Horizons transmitted images from its July flyby with resolutions about 250 to 280 ft per pixel, allowing scientists a view of features about half the size of a city block. The new mosaic image is about 50 mi wide and covers a length of 500 mi, from the edge of Pluto’s Sputnik Planum and northwest to its horizon.

“Nothing of this quality was available for Venus or Mars until decades after their first flybys; yet at Pluto we’re there already—down among the craters, ice fields and mountains—less than five months after flyby,” said Alan Stern, the principal investigator of New Horizons. “The science we can do with these images is simply unbelievable.”

The resolution of the new images is six times better than the resolution New Horizons obtained making its global map of Pluto. The images were captured with the telescopic Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI). As New Horizons passed by 10,000 mi above the surface, LORRI took pictures every three seconds, while New Horizons’ Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera scanned the surface. More images from this set are expected.

“The mountains bordering Sputnik Planum are absolutely stunning at this resolution,” said New Horizons’ John Spencer. “The new details revealed here, particularly the crumpled ridges in the rubbly material surrounding several of the mountains, reinforce our earlier impression that the mountains are huge ice blocks that have been jostled and tumbled and somehow transported to their present locations.”

Also noticeable in the image are the number of craters dotting Pluto’s surface. “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, who is the deputy lead of New Horizons’ Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team. “Looking into Pluto’s depths is also looking back into geologic time, which will help us piece together Pluto’s geological history.”

New Horizons is hurdling through deep space at 32,000 mph, and is over 104 million miles beyond Pluto.