View Pluto’s eerie Beauty in New Stunning Images released by NASA

After New Horizons revealed high resolution, never before seen images of Pluto’s dynamic and complex surface, NASA created this unique visualization of its space environment, from what New Horizons saw from January to July, during its voyage to Pluto. The pictures have a resolution of 250-280 feet per pixel resolution and reveal the features of a section of the Pluto landscape no bigger than a city block.

The images were taken by the New Horizons spacecraft that passed near Pluto over the summer.

The more distant images contribute to the view at the 3 o’clock position, with the top of the heart-shaped, informally named Tombaugh Regio slipping out of view, giving way to the side of Pluto that was facing away from New Horizons during closest approach on July 14.

What do the sharpest views ever of Pluto show?

Along with the closeup of the pits, released late last week, NASA also released a colour closeup featuring badlands, mountains and plains at the edge of Tombaugh Regio. “Nothing of this quality was available for Venus or Mars until decades after their first flybys; yet at Pluto we’re there already – down among the craters, mountains and ice fields – less than five months after flyby!”

Pluto was once considered the ninth planet in our solar system before its demotion.

The pits are typically hundreds of yards across and tens of yards deep.

NASA said the pits shown in the images could be a result of ice fracturing and evaporation on the dwarf planet. New Horizons took these images with its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) during it flyby in July, NASA said. It’s a region which, based on the relative sparsity of impact sites, is believed to be extremely young in geological terms.