New Pluto images reveal mountain ranges textured like ‘dragon scales’

Scientists like McKinnon are trying to figure out what can account for the unusual terrain. The mosaic of images, the highest resolution of Pluto yet, shows dune-like features on the shoreline of a retreating glacier, with rugged water ice mountains and sheer cliffs.

A zoom-in of Pluto’s plains and some mountains.

Other photos zoom into Pluto’s weird geological features: “snakeskin” mountains or the textured surface of Sputnik Planum.

New Horizons flew past Pluto on July 14 and as of Thursday was 72 days and more than 53 million miles beyond the dwarf planet.

The newest high-resolution images of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons are both dazzling and mystifying, revealing a multitude of previously unseen topographic and compositional details.

Yet another incredible image captured on July 14 is this view of the whole planet, showing off the various shades of blue, red and yellow that would be visible to the naked eye – though perhaps not quite so vivid as in this enhanced-color version.

Isolated ice mountains on Pluto.

Said Alan Stern, the New Horizons principal investigator: “I wish Pluto’s discoverer Clyde Tombaugh had lived to see this day”. The informally named Sputnik Planum is abundant in methane, while the Cthulhu Regio shows very little.

For example, they now know that methane is found on crater rims and on the icy plains of Pluto, but there isn’t any yet detected in the middle of craters or dark regions, NASA said.

Of course, Arrakis was actually a desert planet and probably not as eerily colorful as the latest super high-res shot of Pluto above. Outside of Sputnik Planum, methane ice appears to favor brighter areas, but scientists aren’t sure if that’s because methane is more likely to condense there or that its condensation brightens those regions.

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

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.