NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is still about a month from seeing Pluto up close, but that has not stopped the space agency from getting better and better looks at the planet.
According to BBC News, the latest images of Pluto, taken with New Horizon's Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), come at a distance of about 24 million miles. While that may still be significant distance, New Horizons' odometer currently sits at 2.9 billion miles.
"Even though the latest images were made from more than 30 million miles away, they show an increasingly complex surface with clear evidence of discrete equatorial bright and dark regions-some that may also have variations in brightness," Alan Stern, New Horizons' principal investigator, said in a press release. "We can also see that every face of Pluto is different and that Pluto's northern hemisphere displays substantial dark terrains, though both Pluto's darkest and its brightest known terrain units are just south of, or on, its equator. Why this is so is an emerging puzzle."
NASA expects New Horizons to make up that ground by July 14, the tentative date for the spacecraft's historic flyby of the solar system's most distant planet. New Horizons will continue snapping photos of Pluto and its five known moons - Charon, Styx, Nix, Hydra and Kerberos - as it gets closer.
"We're squeezing as much information as we can out of these images, and seeing details we've never seen before," Hal Weaver, a New Horizons project scientist, said in the release. "We've seen evidence of light and dark spots in Hubble Space Telescope images and in previous New Horizons pictures, but these new images indicate an increasingly complex and nuanced surface. Now, we want to start to learn more about what these various surface units might be and what's causing them. By early July we will have spectroscopic data to help pinpoint that."
