Now that New Horizons has successfully completed its flyby of Pluto and moved on in its mission, NASA has the long awaited pleasure to sift through the probe's data.
Highlighting New Horizons' brand new images of Pluto is a close-up view of the dwarf planet's surface and even a portrait of Charon, Pluto's largest moon.
"Pluto New Horizons is a true mission of exploration showing us why basic scientific research is so important," John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington D.C., said in a press release. "The mission has had nine years to build expectations about what we would see during closest approach to Pluto and Charon. Today, we get the first sampling of the scientific treasure collected during those critical moments, and I can tell you it dramatically surpasses those high expectations."
When NASA scientists honed in on the large heart shape seen on Pluto's surface, they found icy mountains as high as 11,000 feet. Since Pluto does not receive any heat from a host planet or another satellite, NASA will seek an explanation for how the distant dwarf planet remains geologically active.
In another press release, NASA unveiled a Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) portrait of Charon and detailed the moon's terrain. Most notably, Charon is without craters, giving it a youthful appearance that is apparently reshaped by geologic activity, like Pluto.
Then, in a third press release dated July 15, NASA showed off the first image of Hydra ever captured. Just 27 miles across at its largest, Hydra is tiny and New Horizons was 400,000 miles away when it captured the image.
"New Horizons has finally nailed the basic physical properties of Hydra," Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist and LORRI science operations lead, said in the release. "We're going to see Hydra even better in the images yet to come."
