NASA's New Horizons spacecraft added to its impressive collection of Pluto snapshots, this time delivering the closest-ever images of the distant dwarf planet.
Revealed in a press release, the new images were captured when New Horizons was at its closest to Pluto during the July 14 flyby. Because of Pluto's size, New Horizons could not enter into an orbit and had to take as many photos as it could manage as it passed the dwarf planet.
"These close-up images, showing the diversity of terrain on Pluto, demonstrate the power of our robotic planetary explorers to return intriguing data to scientists back here on planet Earth," John Grunsfeld, former astronaut and associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said in the release. "New Horizons thrilled us during the July flyby with the first close images of Pluto, and as the spacecraft transmits the treasure trove of images in its onboard memory back to us, we continue to be amazed by what we see."
Since the flyby, New Horizons has gradually delivered its collection of images, which include shots of Pluto's moons: Charon, Nix, Hydra, Kerberos, and Styx. Head over to the spacecraft's official mission website to see more images.
"These new images give us a breathtaking, super-high resolution window into Pluto's geology," New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colo., said in the release. "Nothing of this quality was available for Venus or Mars until decades after their first flybys; yet at Pluto we're there already - down among the craters, mountains and ice fields - less than five months after flyby! The science we can do with these images is simply unbelievable."
