New Images Of Pluto From NASA's New Horizons Spacecraft

We hadn't seen new images of Pluto for several weeks but that all changed today with the release of new close-up images of Pluto by the New Horizons team. They reveal that Pluto's surface texture is even more complex than previously thought. "Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we’ve seen in the solar system," said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado. "If an artist had painted this Pluto before our flyby, I probably would have called it over the top — but that’s what is actually there."

This synthetic perspective view of Pluto, based on the latest high-resolution images to be downlinked from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, shows what you would see if you were approximately 1,100 miles (1,800 kilometers) above Pluto’s equatorial area, looking northeast over the dark, cratered, informally named Cthulhu Regio toward the bright, smooth, expanse of icy plains informally called Sputnik Planum. The entire expanse of terrain seen in this image is 1,100 miles (1,800 kilometers) across. The images were taken as New Horizons flew past Pluto on July 14, 2015, from a distance of 50,000 miles (80,000 kilometers). Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

The press release notes that the new images "reveal new features as diverse as possible dunes, nitrogen ice flows that apparently oozed out of mountainous regions onto plains, and even networks of valleys that may have been carved by material flowing over Pluto’s surface. They also show large regions that display chaotically jumbled mountains reminiscent of disrupted terrains on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa."

"The surface of Pluto is every bit as complex as that of Mars," said Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. "The randomly jumbled mountains might be huge blocks of hard water ice floating within a vast, denser, softer deposit of frozen nitrogen within the region informally named Sputnik Planum."

Mosaic of high-resolution images of Pluto, sent back from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft from Sept. 5 to 7, 2015. The image is dominated by the informally-named icy plain Sputnik Planum, the smooth, bright region across the center. This image also features a tremendous variety of other landscapes surrounding Sputnik. The smallest visible features are 0.5 miles (0.8 kilometers) in size, and the mosaic covers a region roughly 1,000 miles (1600 kilometers) wide. The image was taken as New Horizons flew past Pluto on July 14, 2015, from a distance of 50,000 miles (80,000 kilometers). Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

In the center of this 300-mile (470-kilometer) wide image of Pluto from the New Horizons spacecraft is a large region of jumbled, broken terrain on the northwestern edge of the vast, icy plain informally called Sputnik Planum, to the right. The smallest visible features are 0.5 miles (0.8 kilometers) in size. This image was taken as New Horizons flew past Pluto on July 14, 2015, from a distance of 50,000 miles (80,000 kilometers). Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

Dunes On Pluto

Of special interest is an area that shows what might be a field of dark wind-blown dunes. "Seeing dunes on Pluto -- if that is what they are -- would be completely wild, because Pluto’s atmosphere today is so thin," said William B. McKinnon, a GGI deputy lead from Washington University, St. Louis. "Either Pluto had a thicker atmosphere in the past, or some process we haven’t figured out is at work. It’s a head-scratcher."

This 220-mile (350-kilometer) wide view of Pluto from the New Horizons spacecraft illustrates the incredible diversity of surface reflectivities and geological landforms on the dwarf planet. The image includes dark, ancient heavily cratered terrain; bright, smooth geologically young terrain; assembled masses of mountains; and an enigmatic field of dark, aligned ridges that resemble dunes; its origin is under debate. The smallest visible features are 0.5 miles (0.8 kilometers) in size. This image was taken as New Horizons flew past Pluto on July 14, 2015, from a distance of 50,000 miles (80,000 kilometers). Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

Twilight Effect

The latest images also show that Pluto’s atmospheric haze has more layers than scientists initially thought. The haze actually creates a twilight effect that softly illuminates nightside terrain near sunset, enabling the cameras aboard New Horizons to capture details on the nighttime regions of Pluto that would otherwise be invisible.

This image of Pluto from the New Horizons spacecraft, processed in two different ways, shows how the bright, high-altitude atmospheric haze on Pluto produces a twilight that softly illuminates the surface before sunrise and after sunset, allowing the sensitive cameras on New Horizons to see details in nighttime regions that would otherwise be invisible. The right-hand version of the image has been greatly brightened to bring out faint details of rugged haze-lit topography beyond the terminator of Pluto, which is the line separating day and night. The image was taken as New Horizons flew past Pluto on July 14, 2015, from a distance of 50,000 miles (80,000 kilometers). Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

Two different versions of an image of the haze layers on Pluto, taken by New Horizons as it looked back at the dark side of Pluto nearly 16 hours after close approach, from a distance of 480,000 miles (770,000 kilometers), at a phase angle of 166 degrees. Plutos north is at the top, and the sun illuminates Pluto from the upper right. These images are much higher quality than the digitally compressed images of the haze on Pluto downlinked and released shortly after the July 14 encounter, and allow many new details to be seen. The left version has had only minor processing, while the right version has been specially processed to reveal a large number of discrete haze layers in the atmosphere. In the left version, faint surface details on the narrow sunlit crescent are seen through the haze in the upper right of Pluto disk, and subtle parallel streaks in the haze may be crepuscular rays- shadows cast on the haze by topography such as mountain ranges on Pluto, similar to the rays sometimes seen in the sky after the sun sets behind mountains on Earth. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

New Images To Be Released Tomorrow Of Pluto's Moons

New images of Pluto's largest Moon Charon, and smaller moons Nix and Hydra, will be released tomorrow. The statement hints that the new images will reveal that "each moon is unique and that big moon Charon’s geological past was a tortured one." Over the next few weeks and months we can expect a steady stream of new data and images of the Pluto system!

This image of Charon, taken by the New Horizons spacecraft 10 hours before its closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015 from a distance of 290,000 miles (470,000 kilometers), is a recently downlinked, much higher quality version of a Charon image released on July 15. Charon, which is 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) in diameter, displays a surprisingly complex geological history, including tectonic fracturing; relatively smooth, fractured plains in the lower right; several enigmatic mountains surrounded by sunken terrain features on the right side; and heavily cratered regions in the center and upper left portion of the disk. There are also complex reflectivity patterns on the surface of Charon, including bright and dark crater rays, and the conspicuous dark north polar region at the top of the image. The smallest visible features are 2.9 miles 4.6 kilometers) in size. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI