TORONTO – After more than a month of image-download hiatus, the New Horizons’ team has begun downloading and releasing new images of Pluto. And what the members of the team are finding continues to amaze them.
READ MORE: In Photos: Pluto, then and now
The images reveal a jumble of mountains that researchers say is similar to the terrain found on Jupiter’s moon, Europa, another icy solar system body.
Not only that, but some features such as possible dunes, nitrogen ice floes and valleys are amazing the scientists.
“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). “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.”
During the flyby, New Horizons turned back and captured a stunning image of Pluto eclipsing the sun, allowing scientists to get a better view of Pluto’s atmosphere. At the time, the scientists said that the small world had much more of an atmosphere than had been anticipated.
On Thursday, the research team had another atmospheric surprise: Pluto’s atmosphere may have more layers than thought. This haze, they believe, may cause a twilight effect that illuminates the dwarf planet’s nightside at sunset which could have made it more visible to the cameras on board the spacecraft.
“This bonus twilight view is a wonderful gift that Pluto has handed to us,” said John Spencer, a GGI deputy lead from SwRI. “Now we can study geology in terrain that we never expected to see.”
The imaging team also released a new image of Pluto’s largest moon, Charon.
New Horizons, the fastest spacecraft to ever leave Earth, is now more than about 5 billion kilometres from home and about 69 million kilometres past Pluto.
The spacecraft will head out to the outer reaches of the solar system investigating a Kuiper Belt Object, another small icy world.
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