New Spacecraft Photos Hint at a Rich and Complex Pluto

As NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft blasts closer to Pluto at a pace of 750,000 miles per day, increasingly detailed images are beginning to come our way.

In the latest series of images beamed back to Earth from the mission’s Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) instrument, a complex small world is beginning to reveal itself — vast, dark regions are coming into focus. Now we are in a new regime of Plutonian discovery; these pixelated views are the highest resolution photos we have ever seen of the dwarf planet.

“As New Horizons closes in on Pluto, it’s transforming from a point of light to a planetary object of intense interest,” said NASA’s Director of Planetary Science Jim Green in a news release today (Wednesday). “We’re in for an exciting ride for the next seven weeks.”

“These new images show us that Pluto’s differing faces are each distinct; likely hinting at what may be very complex surface geology or variations in surface composition from place to place,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. “These images also continue to support the hypothesis that Pluto has a polar cap whose extent varies with longitude; we’ll be able to make a definitive determination of the polar bright region’s iciness when we get compositional spectroscopy of that region in July.”

In less than 2 months New Horizons will make its Pluto close encounter and as these gradually-sharpening images are showing us, it seems likely that Pluto will be a rich and complex place.

“By late June the image resolution will be four times better than the images made May 8-12, and by the time of closest approach, we expect to obtain images with more than 5,000 times the current resolution,” added Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md.

These latest photos are derived through a method known as “image deconvolution”, which allows us to see the broad differences in surface morphology. These changes in surface albedo likely real features, revealing the (possible) bright polar ice caps and vast regions that appear to absorb more light. However, some of the image processing can generate spurious details that will disappear in later observations.

Read more at Discovery News