New images show a day in the life of Pluto

NASA’s newest Pluto pictures depict an entire day on the dwarf planet. A full Pluto day is when it makes a full rotation, and it spins at much slower rate than the Earth.

According to NASA, these images and others like them reveal many details about Pluto, including the differences between the encounter hemisphere and the so-called “far side” hemisphere seen only at lower resolution. Still, it’s a huge new development that adds to a long list of Pluto discoveries since New Horizons arrived at the planet months ago.

The pictures of Pluto’s biggest moon joined for this particular picture were shot when New Horizons made its closest pass to 13 from July 7, NASA said. It also came within just 27,000 kilometers, or 17,000 miles, of Charon, making it the only probe to have visited Pluto and Charon.

Most striking are the peculiar cluster of (what appear to be) impact craters on the “far side” of Pluto (the images shown at the 10 o’clock to 2 o’clock positions).

NASA recently released images of what a day in Pluto and its moon, Charon, look like. “Dimples in the bottom (south) edge of Pluto’s disk are artifacts of the way the images were combined to create these composites”, states the release.

The image shows Pluto when New Horizons was closest to the dwarf planet, which you can see at the 6 o’clock position showing the top of the heart-shaped, informally named Tombaugh Regio.

New Horizons is now zooming towards its next flyby target in the Kuiper Belt.