With its long anticipated flyby just days away, New Horizons captured a new image of Pluto showing its mysterious dark spots in heightened detail.
Released Saturday, the new image was taken from two-and-a-half million miles from the dwarf planet. New Horizons is taking particular interest in the dark spots now because its flyby will be on the side of the dwarf planet facing its moon Charon, the opposite side of the dwarf planet.
"It's weird that they're spaced so regularly," Curt Niebur, a program scientist for New Horizons at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in the space agency's press release.
New Horizons has performed its final maneuverings to be on the optimal flyby path and is scheduled to do so the morning of July 14. The dark spots emerged as the probe was taking Pluto's picture from far out and they are now becoming clearer.
"We're close enough now that we're just starting to see Pluto's geology," Niebur said in a previous press release. "It's a unique transition region with a lot of dynamic processes interacting, which makes it of particular scientific interest."
New Horizons is three billion miles from Earth, a journey that has taken nine years to complete.
"Among the structures tentatively identified in this new image are what appear to be polygonal features; a complex band of terrain stretching east-northeast across the planet, approximately 1,000 miles long; and a complex region where bright terrains meet the dark terrains of the whale," Alan Stern, New Horizons' principal investigator, said in the release. "After nine and a half years in flight, Pluto is well worth the wait."
