New Horizons, flying at a distance of just 17,000 kilometres from the surface of Pluto, has sent back what NASA says are the best close-ups of the planet yet.
The latest images of a planet 3 billion miles away show a strip 50 miles wide. The photographs, released on Dec. 4, range from Pluto's jagged horizon about 500 miles northwest of the informally named Sputnik Planum, across the al-Idrisi mountains, over the shoreline of Sputnik, and across its icy plains, according to NASA.
"New 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 back to us, we continue to be amazed by what we see," said John Grunsfeld, former astronaut and associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, according to ABC Net.
"These 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," Grunsfeld said in a statement, according to RT.
"These new images give us a breathtaking, super-high resolution window into Pluto's geology. Nothing of this quality was available for Venus or Mars until decades after their first flybys; yet at Pluto we're there already -- down among the craters, mountains and ice fields -- less than five months after flyby! The science we can do with these images is simply unbelievable," added Alan Stern, principal investigator on the New Horizons mission and a researcher at the Southwest Research Institute, reported UPI.
Using a Long Range Reconnaissance Imager, New Horizons will continue to beam detailed photos over the next few days.
