A couple months after sharing the first portraits of Pluto, NASA has unveiled the first close-ups of the dwarf planet on the edge of the solar system.
According to The Washington Post, the images showing Pluto's surface in stunning detail are what is known as "lossless" and will appear just as clear as they can.
"This is what we came for - these images, spectra and other data types that are going to help us understand the origin and the evolution of the Pluto system for the first time," Alan Stern, New Horizons' principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colo., said in a press release. "And what's coming is not just the remaining 95 percent of the data that's still aboard the spacecraft - it's the best datasets, the highest-resolution images and spectra, the most important atmospheric datasets, and more. It's a treasure trove."
The new images not only shows Pluto's surface in incredible resolution, but also the dwarf planet's complex geological composition.
"The surface of Pluto is every bit as complex as that of Mars," Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., said in another press release. "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."
