These are the clearest photos of Pluto yet
Images NASA recently captured of Pluto were black and white, but that didn鈥檛 keep them from being some of the clearest, most vivid close-up shots of Pluto鈥檚 surface that humans have ever seen.
Captured by NASA鈥檚 , launched in 2006 to fly past Pluto, the photos show craters, huge mountains, and smooth nitrogen ice fields that extend for at least 50 miles. The images were captured in July when New Horizons conducted its closest flyby of Pluto, and were among the most recent batch sent back to Earth.聽
鈥淣ew Horizons thrilled us during the July flyby with the first close images of Pluto, and as the spacecraft transmits the treasure trove of images in its onboard memory back to us, ,鈥� said John Grunsfeld, a former astronaut and the associate administrator for NASA鈥檚 Science Mission Directorate. 鈥淭hese close-up images, showing the diversity of terrain on Pluto, demonstrate the power of our robotic planetary explorers to return intriguing data to scientists back here on planet Earth.鈥�
It took scientists decades to develop technology that could fly past Venus or Mars 鈥� planets much closer to Earth than Pluto.
鈥淭hese new images give us a breathtaking, super-high resolution window into Pluto鈥檚 geology,鈥� said New Horizons Principle Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute. 鈥淣othing of this quality was available for Venus or Mars until decades after their first flybys; yet at Pluto we鈥檙e there already 鈥� down among the craters, mountains and ice fields 鈥� less than five months after flyby! .鈥�
Phil Plait enthuses:聽
Pluto is so cold water ice is hard as rock, and can form mountains thousands of meters tall. The bright plain was probably lower elevation terrain which filled with nitrogen, which is much less rigid than water at these temperatures. It can flow like glaciers do on Earth. So what you鈥檙e seeing there聽is聽a shoreline! It really looks like one, too, with the nitrogen ice meeting the highlands at a 鈥渃onstant sea level鈥�.
The images were captured from a range of just 10,000 miles away using a telescopic Long Range Reconnaissance Imager, which snaps photos every three seconds instead of pointing and shooting 鈥� a mode that requires extremely short exposures or the images will be blurry. They are the best images NASA has captured of Pluto to date; according to NASA, they are five times better than images captured of Pluto鈥檚 cousin Triton by Voyager 2 in 1989.聽
More images are expected to come in the next few days, showing more high-resolution terrain.聽
Following the flyby of Pluto, the New Horizons probe continues to move deeper into space. Presently, it鈥檚 about 3.2 billion miles from Earth. It鈥檚 projected to fly by another object known as 2014 MU69 in the next three years.
[Editor's note: The original post incorrectly stated the path of the New Horizon mission]
