Newly downlinked photos of Pluto from the New Horizons satellite show a rippley terrain stretching on for hundreds of kilometers.
According to BBC News, the probe's mission managers at NASA likened the image to scales, though if any object in the solar system were to have strange geology, it would be Pluto.
"It's a unique and perplexing landscape stretching over hundreds of miles," William McKinnon, New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team deputy lead from Washington University in St. Louis, said in a press release. "It looks more like tree bark or dragon scales than geology. This'll really take time to figure out; maybe it's some combination of internal tectonic forces and ice sublimation driven by Pluto's faint sunlight."
