New Pluto Images Reveal Best Ever, Sharpest Photos of Its Surface

New Horizons is now under transmission of a treasure trove of images and data from its onboard memory back to mission control, and the team is constantly amazed. The ones that were sent back were actually taken about 15 minutes before the spacecraft’s closest approach to the planet and they show us a wealth of detail that we’ve probably never seen before.

According to New Horizons principal investigator, Alan Stern, these new images are simply breathtaking and at taken at super high resolution, revealing Pluto’s stunning geology. “Nothing of this quality was available for Venus or Mars until decades after their first flybys; yet [for] Pluto we’re there already – down among the craters, mountains and ice fields – less than five months after flyby”.

New Horizons scientists plan to use images like these to study many more ancient Kuiper Belt objects if an extended mission is approved. With this resolution, the mountains becoming incredibly stunning, says New Horizons’ John Spencer. One image features Pluto’s rugged Idrisi mountains about 500 miles northwest of the informally named Sputnik Planum, located on the side of Pluto’s well-known heart feature.

Each week, the piano-sized New Horizons spacecraft transmits data stored on its digital recorders from its flight through the Pluto system on July 14 this year.

The new details presently revealed with particular reference to the crumpled ridges in rubbly material that surrounds several of the mountains, further reinforce the earlier impression that the mountains are in fact huge blocks of ice that have been tumbled and jostled and transported somehow to the present locations.

Instead of the usual “point and shoot mode”, LORRI snapped the pictures every three seconds while the Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera scanned Pluto’s surface. The mountains in the center are built mainly from water ice, but the New Horizons science team suspects they’ve been shaped over time by other exotic ices, including nitrogen and methane.

When these images were made, 1994 JR1 was 3.3 billion miles (5.3 billion miles) from the sun, but only 170 million miles (280 million kilometers) away from New Horizons. “Looking into Pluto’s depths is looking back into geologic time, which will help us piece together Pluto’s geological history”.

More high-resolution images are expected in over the next few days.