New Horizons Returns Photos of Hazy 'Arctic' Pluto

15 minutes after its closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft looked back toward the sun and captured this near-sunset view of the rugged, icy mountains and flat ice plains extending to Pluto’s horizon.

As NASA’s New Horizons mission zipped past Pluto and its system of moons on July 14, it carried out an automated, choreographed routine of rapid data gathering. Looking back at the dwarf planet, after closest approach, with dim sunlight scattering through its hazy atmosphere, the spacecraft glimpsed one of the most stunning photos in space history: Pluto blocking the sun, creating a enigmatic view of the tiny world’s atmospheric halo.

Today, in new images released by the New Horizons team, perhaps an even more captivating scene has been realized. While looking back, shortly after flyby from a distance of 11,000 miles (18,000 kilometers), the New Horizons Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC) zoomed into a crescent Pluto, through its atmospheric haze, revealing a very “arctic”-looking mountainous landscape.

“This image really makes you feel you are there, at Pluto, surveying the landscape for yourself,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons Principal Investigator, of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colo. “But this image is also a scientific bonanza, revealing new details about Pluto’s atmosphere, mountains, glaciers and plains.”

The haze speaks not of a frozen, static environment — there’s some incredibly dynamic processes going on that we have only just started to fathom.

“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,” said Will Grundy, lead of the New Horizons Composition team from Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, Ariz.

Weather? Yes, weather.

A closer view of the smooth expanse of the informally named Sputnik Planum (right) is flanked to the west (left) by rugged mountains up to 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) high, including the informally named Norgay Montes in the foreground and Hillary Montes on the skyline. The backlighting highlights more than a dozen layers of haze in Pluto’s tenuous but distended atmosphere.

As we dive into the vast array of observations gradually being streamed back from New Horizons after its close encounter, we’re seeing a complex Pluto that is way more dynamic than we ever dreamed. Before the New Horizons encounter, astronomers knew the dwarf planet possessed some kind of atmosphere, but after seeing Pluto’s surface, evidence is building around this hazy atmosphere cycling exotic ices from the surface and into the atmosphere — akin to Earth’s hydrological cycle.

Read more at Discovery News