See the Frozen Canyons of Pluto’s North Pole

On the left side of the featured image, there’s a canyon measuring almost 45 miles wide.

The canyon highlighted in the annotated version of the image below is the biggest one, with a width measuring 45 miles. A valley (marked in blue) runs along the length of the canyon floor.

The nearby terrain appears to have been blanketed by material that obscures small-scale topographic features. Some of them are thought to be created when ice on the surface has melted, causing the ground to collapse.

The color in the photo was enhanced to attract attention to the yellowish terrain, not seen elsewhere on Pluto. High elevations are shown in distinctive yellow while low latitude terrain is represented through bluish gray color.

This image was obtained by New Horizons’ Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC). Its resolution is about 2,230 feet (680 metres) per pixel.

These faults and fractures run “at least about 1 800 kilometers long and in places there are chasms 7.5 kilometers deep”.

Pluto is 3.26 billion miles away from Earth and the New Horizons space probe has been sending back detailed photos of its surface since a historic fly-by in 2015.

Just 15 minutes after its closest approach to Pluto in July, NASA’s New Horizons captured what is now the most lovely image of the dwarf planet. The spacecraft itself is on its way to explore a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) in 2019. Scientists believe it probably has a rocky core surrounded by a mantle of frozen water. Findings also showed the presence of little nitrogen ice. Pluto has fourteen times the mass of Ceres – the dwarf planet that resides in the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars.

We already know Pluto features a surprisingly complex geology, but data returned by New Horizons still continues to stump scientists.