Pluto’s Mountains, Hazy Atmosphere revealed in New Images from New Horizons

The latest images that are taken by the NASA’s show the views of the people in the majestic icy mountains, streams of frozen nitrogen and hunting low-lying hazes. And that’s saying a lot, because the courageous spacecraft has also sent back some truly spectacular pictures-my favorite is this silhouette after New Horizons successfully made its historic flyby.

New Horizons has revealed several surprising things about Pluto since its launch about a decade ago. While providing details about photos captured by the probe, Alan Stern, Principal Investigator of New Horizons, said, “This image really makes you feel you are there, at Pluto, surveying the landscape for yourself”.

“But this image is also a scientific bonanza, revealing new details about Pluto’s atmosphere, mountains, glaciers and plains”, he added. “Pluto is surprisingly Earth-like in this regard, and no one predicted it”.

And zooming in on the centre of the image brings the mountains and plains into even sharper focus.

The image by the NASA’s also provides the evidence we observe the hydrological cycle on Pluto, but involves the soft and exotic ices, including nitrogen is present in the Pluto.

The New Horizons mission is the first one to get a personal look at Pluto and its three moons.

The movement of the thin haze layers showed a weather system that changes each day, like on Earth, said New Horizons scientist Will Grundy in an interview with NASA.

The spokesman added: “Bright areas east of the vast icy plain informally named Sputnik Planum appear to have been blanketed by these ices, which may have evaporated from the surface of Sputnik and then been redeposited to the east”.

Alan Howard, a member of the mission’s Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team from the University of Virginia said that they were surprised to discover that Pluto had a nitrogen-based glacial cycle in spite of being an icy dwarf planet.

A panorama also depicted glaciers flowing from the icy region back into the plain like how it occurs in Antarctica and Greenland.