NASA releases stunning sunset view of Pluto’s mountains

Hillary Montes are on the western (left) skyline, with Norgay Montes in the central foreground and the frozen Sputnik Planum to the east (right).

“This image really makes you feel you are there, at Pluto, surveying the landscape for yourself”, said New Horizons lead scientist Alan Stern. We also see the many layers of Pluto’s atmospheric haze, which start close to the ground and extend some 60 miles up. The scene measures 780 miles (1,250 kilometers) across.

This new view of Pluto’s crescent – taken by New Horizons’ wide-angle Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC) on July 14 and downlinked to Earth on September 13 – offers an oblique look across Plutonian landscapes with dramatic backlighting from the Sunday . Instead of water, though, the New Horizons team thinks it’s nitrogen at work and depositing soft, exotic ices across the dwarf planet.

The photo even shows a “fog-like” haze layer in the shadows of some of the world’s ice mountains, NASA added.

Sputnik Planum (Sputnik Plain) is an icy area within a heart-shaped region on the dwarf planet’s surface dubbed “Tombaugh Regio” (Tombaugh Region) by scientists.

Images transmitted from Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft have more than doubled the amount of Pluto’s surface seen at resolutions as good as 400 metres per pixel.

They say they can see fog along the surface of Pluto too.

“We did not expect to find hints of a nitrogen-based glacial cycle on Pluto operating in the frigid conditions of the outer solar system”, said Alan Howard, of the mission’s Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

Making a comparison between Pluto and earth, experts also commented why some of the planets features are “surprisingly earth-like”.

NASA said the image shows evidence Pluto may have a hydrological cycle – meaning evaporation, condensation and precipitation. New Horizons relayed just 5 percent of its flyby data back in the immediate aftermath of the close encounter, keeping the vast majority on board for later transmission.