New pictures of Pluto released by Nasa show incredible images of rugged icy mountains and flat frozen plants as the New Horizons spacecraft looked back towards the dwarf planet at twilight.
The huge panorama, which is 780 miles wide, was captured just minutes after the Sun set over Pluto casting the final rays of light over the 11,000 feet Norgay Mountains.
The picture was taken 11,000 miles from the surface as New Horizons sailed past the icy body on July 14, the day of closest approach.
The spacecraft has collected so much data it will take 16 months to send it all back to Earth.
The mountains captured in the new images are roughly the height of The Pyrenees, but smaller ranges have been spotted on bright, heart-shaped region named Tombaugh Region.
Nasa said the new pictures reveal a bewildering variety of surface features that have scientists reeling because of their range and complexity.
“Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we’ve seen in the solar system,”
said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado.
“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.”
New features revealed this week include possible dunes, nitrogen ice flows that apparently oozed out of mountainous regions onto plains, and even networks of valleys that may have been carved by material flowing over Pluto’s surface.
They also show large regions that display chaotically jumbled mountains reminiscent of disrupted terrains on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa.
“The surface of Pluto is every bit as complex as that of Mars,”
said Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.
“The randomly jumbled mountains might be huge blocks of hard water ice floating within a vast, denser, softer deposit of frozen nitrogen within the region informally named Sputnik Planum.”
New images also show the most heavily cratered, and thus oldest, terrain yet seen by New Horizons on Pluto next to the youngest, most crater-free icy plains. There might even be a field of dark wind-blown dunes, among other possibilities.
“Seeing dunes on Pluto -- if that is what they are -- would be completely wild, because Pluto’s atmosphere today is so thin,”
said William McKinnon, a GGI deputy lead from Washington University, St. Louis.
“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.”
Pluto is the first Kuiper Belt object visited by a mission from Earth. New Horizons will continue on its adventure deeper into the Kuiper Belt, where thousands of objects hold frozen clues as to how the solar system formed
“This bonus twilight view is a wonderful gift that Pluto has handed to us,”
said John Spencer, of the Southwest Research Institute
“Now we can study geology in terrain that we never expected to see.”