NASA shared another backlit image of Pluto similar to one released last month, adding another impressive shot to its collection from the New Horizons mission.
The new image, released Thursday, is a complete version of the shot downlinked in Sept. that showed the dwarf planet's crescent. The image was captured 15 minutes after the New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach with Pluto during its historic flyby in July.
"The wide-angle perspective of this view shows the deep haze layers of Pluto's atmosphere extending all the way around Pluto, revealing the silhouetted profiles of rugged plateaus on the night (left) side," NASA stated in its release. "The shadow of Pluto cast on its atmospheric hazes can also be seen at the uppermost part of the disk. On the sunlit side of Pluto (right), the smooth expanse of the informally named icy plain Sputnik Planum is flanked to the west (above, in this orientation) by rugged mountains up to 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) high, including the informally named Norgay Montes in the foreground and Hillary Montes on the skyline.
"The backlighting highlights more than a dozen high-altitude layers of haze in Pluto's tenuous atmosphere. The horizontal streaks in the sky beyond Pluto are stars, smeared out by the motion of the camera as it tracked Pluto."
Click here for an even higher resolution image, and click anywhere along the crescent to see Pluto's terrain in stunning detail.
"This image really makes you feel you are there, at Pluto, surveying the landscape for yourself," New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colo., said last month. "But this image is also a scientific bonanza, revealing new details about Pluto's atmosphere, mountains, glaciers and plains."
