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Pluto seen in full in new high resolution images

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - The spigot has opened again, and Pluto pictures are pouring in once more from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft.

Friday afternoon, the New Horizons team uploaded almost 40 new high-resolution images of Pluto to the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory website, creating this full-view of the dwarf planet.
Friday afternoon, the New Horizons team uploaded almost 40 new high-resolution images of Pluto to the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory website, creating this full-view of the dwarf planet.Read moreNASA
    by Marcia Dunn, Associated Press, Inquirer
    Published 

Click here to download the full view of Pluto in high resolution

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - The spigot has opened again, and Pluto pictures are pouring in once more from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft.

These newest snapshots reveal an even more diverse landscape than scientists imagined before New Horizons swept past Pluto in July, becoming the first spacecraft to visit the distant dwarf planet.

"If an artist had painted this Pluto before our flyby, I probably would have called it over the top - but that's what is actually there," said Alan Stern, New Horizons' principal scientist from Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.

In one picture, dark ancient craters border much younger icy plains. Dark ridges also are visible that some scientists speculate might be dunes.

One outer solar-system geologist, William McKinnon of Washington University in St. Louis, said that if the ridges are, in fact, dunes, that would be "completely wild" given Pluto's thin atmosphere.

"Either Pluto had a thicker atmosphere in the past, or some process we haven't figured out is at work. It's a head-scratcher," McKinnon said in a written statement.

The jumble of mountains, on the other hand, may be huge blocks of ice floating in a softer, vast deposit of frozen nitrogen.

After several weeks of collecting engineering data from New Horizons, scientists started getting fresh Pluto pictures last weekend. The latest images were released Thursday.

Besides geologic features, the images show that the atmospheric haze surrounding Pluto has multiple layers. What's more, the haze creates a twilight effect that enables New Horizons to study places on the night side that scientists never expected to see.

Monday marks two months from New Horizons' close encounter with Pluto on July 14, following a journey from Cape Canaveral, Fla., spanning 3 billion miles and 91/2 years. As of Friday, the spacecraft was 44 million miles past Pluto.

So much data were collected during the Pluto flyby that it will take until next fall to retrieve it all on Earth.

    Marcia Dunn, Associated Press, Inquirer