Close Up Images Of Pluto

Taken at a height of 12,500km above the planet it shows complex surface features including plains and mountain ranges. It looked like a fuzzy blob in our best telescopes.

“Home run!” said Alan Stern, mission principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

This image has been captured when the spacecraft was about 478,000 miles away from Pluto’s surface.

Remarkable details of Pluto’s largest moon Charon are revealed in this image from New Horizons taken late on July 13, 2015 from a distance of 289,000 miles. In the years since, it’s travelled more than 3 billion miles, f lying at speeds greater than 30,000 miles per hour. Huge mountains.

“Pluto New Horizons is a true mission of exploration showing us why basic scientific research is so important”, said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

Pluto has a variety of ices in its crust, not just water and methane ice.

“Charon has been active [recently], and there are mountains in the Kuiper belt”, Stern said during the press conference. “It’s too soft”. The surface appears to have mountain ranges that scientists say could be mainly composed of ice. And New Horizons must share time on the big 70 metre dishes with other satellites trying to keep in touch. He marveled: “I think the whole system is unbelievable”.

They said that suggests to their surprise that Pluto is geologically active even now and is being sculpted not by outside forces but by internal heat. Until then, it will send data back to the New Horizons team. It took nine years, but now the surfaces of Pluto and Charon have been revealed with mountains and, no, there are no whales. “That’s just astonishing”.

The objects are believed to be remnants from the formation of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago.

Incredible images of Pluto, the closest ever seen by humankind.

“It’s a small world with deep canyons, troughs, cliffs … dark regions that are still slightly mysterious to us”.

The encapsulating surface of Charon.

“Pluto did not disappoint”.

This included the first well-resolved images of one of Pluto’s four small moons, the potato-shaped Hydra.

With 99 percent of the data gathered during the encounter still on the spaceship, New Horizons’ survival was critical to the mission. It’s just pixels, but NASA is very excited about it because it shows the elongated moon’s size.

And Pluto, long considered the farthest planet from the Sun before it was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006, has never before been explored. It will now travel into a region at the edge of the solar system beyond Neptune called the Kuiper Belt.

Our first glimpse of the planets in our solar system weren’t always as crisp and clean as the images from Pluto.