After delivering some never-before-seen views of Pluto's moons, the New Horizons spacecraft has returned more images of the dwarf planet's surface.
According to BBC News, New Horizons found a second mountain range within the heart-shaped region visible on Pluto's surface. The second series of mountains lies about 110km from the first one.
"There is a pronounced difference in texture between the younger, frozen plains to the east and the dark, heavily-cratered terrain to the west," Jeff Moore, New Horizons' Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team (GGI) chief at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., said in a press release. "There's a complex interaction going on between the bright and the dark materials that we're still trying to understand."
Thanks to its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), New Horizons has been able to deliver images of three of Pluto's moons: Charon, Nix, and Hydra. As New Horizons continues its journey through the Kuiper Belt, it is expected to capture the other two, Kerberos and Styx.
"Additional compositional data has already been taken of Nix, but is not yet downlinked. It will tell us why this region is redder than its surroundings," Carly Howett, a New Horizons mission scientist, told BBC News. "This observation is so tantalizing, I'm finding it hard to be patient for more Nix data to be downlinked."
