Breathtaking Pluto —

These are the best photos of Pluto you’ll likely see in your lifetime

New Horizons sends back its first batch of super high-resolution photos.

Behold: the mountainous shoreline of Sputnik Planum.
Behold: the mountainous shoreline of Sputnik Planum.

Finally, the highest resolution images are in from the edge of the solar system. Late Friday NASA released pictures of Pluto's varied terrain with a resolution of 77 to 85 meters per pixel, and these eye-popping images bring us even more detail about a complex world with cratered, mountainous terrain.

The photos of Sputnik Planum show a range of mountains crammed together, before abruptly running into the relatively flat left side of Pluto's heart. "The new details revealed here, particularly the crumpled ridges in the rubbly material surrounding several of the mountains, reinforce our earlier impression that the mountains are huge ice blocks that have been jostled and tumbled and somehow transported to their present locations," said New Horizons science team member John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute.

The higher resolution photos will allow scientists to better understand Pluto's puzzling geology, which has surprised with an active surface that indicates the presence of interior heating. For example, in the photo below, features such as layering and the interior of crater walls can be seen. With additional analysis, this should provide a snapshot of Pluto's geological history and provide some answers about the dwarf planet's curious evolution.

New Horizons will send back more of these high resolution photos, taken by its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager at a distance of 17,000 km, about 15 minutes before New Horizons’ closest approach to Pluto, during the next couple of weeks. And they are likely to remain our best view of the world for some time. 

Pluto's icy plains and layered craters may be the key to unlocking its curious history.
Enlarge / Pluto's icy plains and layered craters may be the key to unlocking its curious history.

With NASA's limited planetary exploration funds, the agency has numerous other high priorities in the outer solar system—places like Jupiter’s ice-covered ocean world of Europa or the moons of Enceladus and Titan around Saturn. One has geysers shooting into space between ice cracks and the other oceans of methane. There are also the systems of Neptune and Uranus, only briefly visited by the Voyagers. The new Pluto images have a resolution about five times higher than the Voyager images of Neptune's intriguing moon Triton.

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Channel Ars Technica