Skip to footer

Stunning new Pluto photos: See mountains, sunset, wispy atmosphere

NASA releases breathtaking Pluto images, showing up-close detail of the dwarf planet.

|
SwRI/JHUAPL/NASA
A zoomed-in view of a photo NASA’s New Horizons probe took on July 14, 2015, when it was just 11,000 miles (18,000 kilometers) from Pluto. The near-sunset scene, which is 230 miles (380 km) across, shows rugged ice mountains up to 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) high and wide, flat plains.
|
SwRI/JHUAPL/NASA
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft looked back toward the sun 15 minutes after its closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015, capturing this near-sunset view of the dwarf planet’s icy mountains and flat ice plains.
|
SwRI/JHUAPL/NASA
The setting sun illuminates fog or near-surface haze on Pluto in this small section of an image taken by NASA’s New Horizons probe on July 14, 2015, when it was 11,000 miles (18,000 kilometers) from the dwarf planet. The image covers a stretch of land 115 miles (185 km) wide.
|
SwRI/JHUAPL/NASA
This New Horizons image shows how ice (probably frozen nitrogen) is flowing from Pluto’s mountains through valleys (outlined by red arrows) onto the plains known as Sputnik Planum; the “flow front” there is outlined by blue arrows in this photo, which covers an area 390 miles (630-kilometer) wide.

A spectacular new image from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft shows Pluto in an entirely new light.

The photo, which New Horizons took during its epic July 14 flyby of Pluto, captures a gorgeous sunset view. Towering ice mountains cast long shadows, and more than a dozen layers of the dwarf planet's wispy atmosphere are clearly visible.

"This image really makes you feel you are there, at Pluto, surveying the landscape for yourself," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement today (Sept. 17). "But this image is also a scientific bonanza, revealing new details about Pluto's atmosphere, mountains, glaciers and plains." [See more Pluto photos by New Horizons]

New Horizons captured the panorama, which covers a stretch of land 780 miles (1,250 kilometers) across, using the probe's wide-angle Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera on July 14, just 15 minutes after closest approach to Pluto.

The spacecraft turned back and looked toward the sun, snapping the photo at a distance of just 11,000 miles (18,000 km) from the dwarf planet, NASA officials said. (At closest approach, New Horizons was about 7,800 miles, or 12,550 km, from Pluto's surface.)

The result was a new perspective on Pluto's Norgay Montes and Hillary Montes, two ranges of ice mountains that rise up to 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) above the dwarf planet's frigid surface. The backlit photo also reveals new details about Pluto's nitrogen-dominated atmosphere, showing many different layers, extending from ground-bound fog to wispy tendrils more than 60 miles (100 km) up.

"In addition to being visually stunning, these low-lying hazes hint at the weather changing from day to day on Pluto, just like it does here on Earth," Will Grundy, leader of New Horizons' composition team from Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, said in the same statement.

The new panorama and other recently downloaded New Horizons images also shed light on how ice — likely made of nitrogen and other materials rather than water — flows into a vast, flat glacial plain known as Sputnik Planum. Some of Sputnik Planum's ice apparently evaporates, gets deposited in a region of rough terrain to the east and then flows back down into the plain as glaciers, via a system of valleys.

These glaciers are similar to those seen in Greenland and Antarctica here on Earth, researchers said.

"We did not expect to find hints of a nitrogen-based glacial cycle on Pluto operating in the frigid conditions of the outer solar system," said Alan Howard of the University of Virginia, a member of the mission's geology, geophysics and imaging team. "Driven by dim sunlight, this would be directly comparable to the hydrological cycle that feeds ice caps on Earth, where water is evaporated from the oceans, falls as snow and returns to the seas through glacial flow."

"Pluto is surprisingly Earth-like in this regard, and no one predicted it," Stern added.

New Horizons beamed the new backlit panorama home to mission control on Sunday (Sept. 13), and NASA released the photo today.

The world can expect to see many more stunning new views from the Pluto flyby over the coming year or so. New Horizons relayed just 5 percent of its flyby data back in the immediate aftermath of the close encounter, keeping the vast majority on board for later transmission. That data dump began in earnest earlier this month and is expected to take about 12 months, New Horizons team members have said.

About video ads

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

Copyright 2015 SPACE.com, a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Stunning new Pluto photos: See mountains, sunset, wispy atmosphere
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/0918/Stunning-new-Pluto-photos-See-mountains-sunset-wispy-atmosphere
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe