See The Newest ‘Snakeskin’ Image of Pluto From NASA

“This’ll really take time to figure out; maybe it’s some combination of internal tectonic forces and ice sublimation driven by Pluto‘s faint sunlight”.

The image above shows the separation between night and day on Pluto, revealing unusual mountain ridges. Then, Ralph, which is equipped with different colored filters that astronomers combine, is what gives a colorful look at Pluto’s surface.

The high-resolution shot was taken by New Horizons‘ narrow-angle Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on July 14, but just downlinked on Sunday. “Many landforms have their own distinct colors, telling a wonderfully complex geological and climatological story that we have only just begun to decode”.

Another photo taken on July 14 is also one of the sharpest images yet seen of Pluto’s surface.

A close look at Pluto reveals snakeskin-textured mountain ridges. In addition to the dune-like features, you can also see the old shoreline of a shrinking glacial lake and stark “water ice mountains” sporting steep cliffs.

A close-cropped version of that photo zooms in on isolated ice mountains in the middle of a frozen plain, NASA said.

Because of the vast distances involved – more than 3 billion miles – the size of the spacecraft’s antenna and the power of its transmitters, it will take more than a year and a half for New Horizons to beam back all of its stored imagery and data.

The distribution of methane across the surface is anything but simple, with higher concentrations on bright plains and crater rims, but usually none in the centers of craters or darker regions.

The latest batch of Pluto images from Nasa’s New Horizons mission have revealed previously unseen topographic details on the unusual, icy world.

The photos also demonstrate that methane, a chemical compound based off carbon, seems to be found in Pluto’s brighter areas.

Pluto in color, in its highest resolution yet.

NASA has received new images of the surface of Pluto from New Horizons, which the organization says resembles “snakeskin”.

“It’s like the classic chicken-or-egg problem”, said Will Grundy from Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.