Washington: NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has returned the sharpest images ever of cratered, mountainous and glacial terrains on Pluto and the best close-ups of the mysterious system that humans may see for decades.
These latest pictures are part of a sequence taken near New Horizons' closest approach to Pluto, with resolutions of about 250-280 feet per pixel - revealing features less than half the size of a city block on Pluto's diverse surface.
"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," he added.
The pictures trend from Pluto's jagged horizon about 800 km northwest of the informally named Sputnik Planum across the al-Idrisi mountains - over the shoreline of Sputnik and across its icy plains.
"These new images give us a breathtaking, super-high resolution window into Pluto's geology," added New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern.
Nothing of this quality was available for Venus or Mars until decades after their first fly-bys.
"Yet at Pluto we are there already - down among the craters, mountains and ice fields - less than five months after fly-by! The science we can do with these images is simply unbelievable," he added.
These new images are six times better than the resolution of the global Pluto map New Horizons obtained, and five times better than the best images of Pluto's cousin Triton, Neptune's large moon, obtained by Voyager 2 in 1989.
Mission scientists are expecting more imagery from this set over the next several days.
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 250-280 feet per pixel - revealing features less than half the size of a city block on Pluto's diverse surface.
"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.
These new images are six times better than the resolution of the global Pluto map New Horizons obtained.
"These new images give us a breathtaking, super-high resolution window into Pluto's geology," added New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern.
Advertisement
"Yet at Pluto we are there already - down among the craters, mountains and ice fields - less than five months after fly-by! The science we can do with these images is simply unbelievable," he added.
Advertisement
Mission scientists are expecting more imagery from this set over the next several days.
Advertisement
COMMENTS
Advertisement
Supervolcano Discovered On Pluto, Could Be Evidence Of Subsurface Ocean NASA's New Horizons Spacecraft Captures ''Heart-Shaped'' Glacier On Pluto's Surface NASA Shares Stunning Image Of Pluto That Shows Its ''True Colours'' "Jindal Group Executive Showed Porn, Groped Me On Flight": Woman To NDTV Bangladesh Imposes Curfew, Deploys Military As 105 Die In Protests Over 300 Indian Students Return Home As 105 Bangladeshis Killed In Protests Joe Biden Is The Best Person To Take On Trump, Says His Campaign Wife Among Two Jailed For Life For Man's Murder In Gurugram: Cops 1,100 Flights Cancelled In US As Microsoft Outage Disrupts Operations Track Latest News Live on NDTV.com and get news updates from India and around the world.