{"id":11855,"date":"2015-12-05T11:29:14","date_gmt":"2015-12-05T16:29:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hobbyspace.com\/Blog\/?p=11855"},"modified":"2015-12-05T11:29:14","modified_gmt":"2015-12-05T16:29:14","slug":"new-horizons-sharpest-images-yet-of-plutos-diverse-surface","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hobbyspace.com\/Blog\/?p=11855","title":{"rendered":"New Horizons: Sharpest images yet of Pluto’s diverse surface"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New Horizons probe\u00a0will be\u00a0slowly downloading images and data from its July flyby of Pluto over the next year. Yesterday the mission released\u00a0the highest resolutions\u00a0images yet obtained\u00a0of the surface of Pluto.<\/p>\n

New Horizons Returns the First of Its Very Best Images of Pluto<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft has sent back the first few of a series of the sharpest views of Pluto it obtained during its July flyby \u2013 and this image sequence forms the best close-ups of Pluto that humans may see for decades.<\/p>\n

Every week the piano-sized New Horizons spacecraft transmits data stored on its digital recorders from its flight through the Pluto system on July 14. These latest pictures are part of a sequence taken near New Horizons\u2019 closest approach to Pluto, with resolutions of about 250-280 feet (77-85 meters) per pixel \u2013 revealing features less than half the size of a city block on the diverse surface of the distant planet. In these new images, New Horizons captured a wide variety of spectacular, cratered, mountainous and glacial terrains.<\/p>\n

\"MountainousShorline[1]\"<\/a>
The Mountainous Shoreline of Sputnik Planum: Great blocks of Pluto\u2019s water-ice crust appear jammed together in the informally named al-Idrisi mountains. Some mountain sides appear coated in dark material, while other sides are bright.\u00a0(Click for full image and caption<\/a>)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\u201cThese 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,\u201d said John Grunsfeld, former astronaut and associate administrator for NASA\u2019s Science Mission Directorate. \u201cNew 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\u00a0back to us, we continue to be amazed by what we see.\u201d<\/p>\n

The images being released today form a strip 50 miles (80 kilometers) wide trending from Pluto\u2019s jagged horizon about 500 miles (800 kilometers) northwest of the informally named Sputnik Planum, across the al-Idrisi mountains, onto the shoreline of Sputnik and then across its icy plains.<\/p>\n

\"CratersandPlains[1]\"<\/a>
Layered Craters and Icy Plains: Pluto\u2019s rugged, icy cratered plains include layering in the interior walls of many craters. Layers in geology usually mean an important change in composition or event, but at the moment New Horizons team members do not know if they are seeing local, regional or global layering. (Click for full image and caption<\/a>)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\u201cThese new images give us a breathtaking, super-high resolution window into Pluto\u2019s geology,\u201d said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. \u201cNothing of this quality was available for Venus or Mars until decades after their first flybys; yet at Pluto we\u2019re there already \u2013 down among the craters, ice fields and mountains \u2013 less than five months after flyby! The science we can do with these images is simply unbelievable.\u201d<\/p>\n

A video made from these images<\/a> reveals amazing details on a world 3 billion miles away \u2013 as do individual close-ups taken from the wider swath. The 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\u2019s cousin Triton, Neptune\u2019s large moon, obtained by Voyager 2 in 1989.<\/p>\n