New Horizons’ Latest Image Shows Pluto Backlit by the Sun

Releasing a tranche of new images, mission controllers also gave more information about crucial new data gathered during the spacecraft’s historic flight through the Pluto system on July 14. The image was taken at a distance of 1.25 million miles from the dwarf planet and can resolve structures as small as 12 miles wide. The image, delivered to Earth on July 23, is displayed with north at the top of the frame. While there’s very little surface detail, the silhouetted spacerock reveals quite a bit about Pluto’s atmosphere, which scientists believe contains haze as high as 80 miles above the surface.

NASA came up with its first closeup image of a region close to Pluto’s equator that consists of a range of mountains that rise as high as 11,000 feet.

The close-up images of Pluto have been combined with color data from the Ralph instrument, it paints a new and surprising portrait of the dwarf planet. Those gases are then believed to fall to the lower parts of the atmosphere where they cool and condense as ice particles, creating the spectacular haze New Horizons caught on camera.

The dwarf planet is so cold, scientists suspect that much of its atmosphere is frozen to its surface.

Hazy skies and flowing “glaciers” of nitrogen ice have been discovered on Pluto.

These ice flows – which might still be active – are found on Pluto’s vast icy plain, now called Sputnik Planum after Earth’s first man-made satellite. Well, current models suggest that when ultraviolet light from the sun breaks apart methane, it causes hydrocarbon gases like ethylene and acetylene to build up. In the southernmost region of the heart, adjacent to the dark equatorial region, it appears that ancient, heavily-cratered terrain (informally named “Cthulhu Regio”) has been invaded by much newer icy deposits.

“We don’t understand why there’s a haze layer up to 100 miles outward”, said Cathy Olkin, New Horizons deputy project scientist at SwRI.

The team responsible for the New Horizons flyby of Pluto last week released new pictures Friday of the previously unexplored world on the edge of the solar system.

Among other latest findings are new images of Pluto’s second and third moons: Nix (42 kilometers in length) and Hydra (55 kilometers).

New Horizons will continue to transmit data collected until the end of 2016.

The spacecraft may have arrived just in time to record this image, said Alan Stern, principal investigator for the mission. It appears that it experiences seasons during its 248-year orbit around the sun, according to Cathy Olkin, a scientist on the mission from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.