New Horizons delivers the highest resolution images yet from dwarf planet Pluto

NASA’s history-making flyby of Pluto this year with its New Horizons spacecraft keeps coming up with the goods, and these latest images sent back from the probe give us our closest look yet at the icy dwarf planet.

On July 14, NASA’s New Horizons became the first spacecraft to pass by Pluto, offering scientists unprecedented insight.

The images are black and white and show craters, mountains and glacial terrain in high resolution.

What you’re looking at is about 77-85 metres per pixel, captured arond 17,000 km above the surface. One New Horizons team member explained the picture reinforced their “earlier impression that the mountains are huge ice blocks that have been jostled and tumbled and somehow transported to their present locations”.

The images were taken with the LORRI telescope. The images are the best ones ever taken on the planet, and will likely be the best we’ll see for a while.

NASA has released high-resolution images it described as “the best close-ups of Pluto that humans may see for decades”.

Last summer the New Horizons spacecraft made its closest pass by the dwarf planet Pluto.

The individual images were taken by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) over approximately a minute just 15 minutes before closest approach.

The images here are from a strip of Pluto’s surface 50 miles (80 kilometers) wide about 500 miles (800 kilometers) northwest of the informally named Sputnik Planum, across the al-Idrisi mountains, onto the shoreline of Sputnik and then across its icy plains. This mode requires unusually short exposures to avoid blurring the images.

The photos have a resolution six times higher than the spacecraft’s global map of Pluto and five times better than the highest resolution images of Neptune’s moon Triton taken by Voyager 2 in 1989.

Mission scientists expect more imagery from this set over the next several days, showing even more terrain at this highest resolution.

There are rough features in the form of ridges that surround numerous mountains. It is expected to leave Pluto behind and go into the regions beyond the solar system.

Meanwhile, the New Horizons spacecraft is speeding away through space at the rate of 32,000 miles per hour.