NASA has just released some new, high resolution, color images of Pluto that nobody outside the agency has ever seen. Of course, these snapshots were taken by the New Horizons probe, which flew past our dwarf planet on July 14th. More important than the random snaps, though, these pictures provided us with the most detailed look at Pluto’s surface and landscape.
“It’s a unique and perplexing landscape stretching over hundreds of miles,” explains William McKinnon, the deputy lead of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team, from Washington University in St. Louis. “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.”
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