On Thursday, NASA released some of the latest pictures of Pluto captured by the New Horizons spacecraft. The astronomers who have sent the pictures from NASA’s flyby say that it has revealed a new range of complexities.
Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we’ve seen in the solar system. If an artist had painted this Pluto before our flyby, I probably would have called it over the top — but that’s what is actually there.
– Alan Stern, New Horizons Principal Investigator
New Horizons began the download of tens of GBs of data only recently. The pictures that have been released are the one downlinked in the past few days.
“The surface of Pluto is every bit as complex as that of Mars. The randomly jumbled mountains might be huge blocks of hard water ice floating within a vast, denser, softer deposit of frozen nitrogen within the region informally named Sputnik Planum.
– Jeff Moore, Leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team