NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has sent back some of the sharpest images of Pluto, showing a wide variety of cratered, mountainous and glacial terrains, which may be the best close-ups of the icy-dwarf planet that humans could see for decades.
Each week the piano-sized New Horizons spacecraft transmits data stored on its digital recorders from its flight through the Pluto system on July 14 this year.
These latest pictures are part of a sequence taken near New Horizons’ closest approach to Pluto, with resolutions of about 77-85 metres per pixel — showing features less than half the size of a city block on Pluto’s diverse surface.
In these new images, New Horizons captured a wide variety of cratered, mountainous and glacial terrains.
“These 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,” said John Grunsfeld, former astronaut and associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
“New 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, we continue to be amazed by what we see,” Grunsfeld said.
These latest images form a strip 80 kilometres wide on a world 4.8 billion km away.
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