MALIBU CITY

NASA unveiled new images today from its New Horizons mission to Pluto, showing more detail on the dwarf planet’s surface — as well as additional evidence of flowing ice. Let’s start backwards with what you could call a “farewell” image, which is an eclipse of the sun by Pluto as the New Horizons craft sailed off into the outer edges of the solar system. The image reveals surprisingly thick, hazy skies that are at least several times higher than what planetary scientists had expected:

“My jaw was on the ground when I saw this first image of an alien atmosphere in the Kuiper Belt,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, in a statement. “It reminds us that exploration brings us more than just incredible discoveries–it brings incredible beauty.”
The haze appears to be a key part of the hydrocarbon compounds that give the planet’s surface its reddish hue, according to Michael Summers, a New Horizons co-investigator from George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia.
“We knew that a mission to Pluto would bring some surprises, and now — 10 days after closest approach — we can say that our expectation has been more than surpassed,” said John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate. “With flowing ices, exotic surface chemistry, mountain ranges, and vast haze, Pluto is showing a diversity of planetary geology that is truly thrilling.”

What’s also interesting is the compositional data New Horizons is sending back from its Ralph instrument, showing that the Sputnik Planum region has plenty of nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and methane ice.
“At Pluto’s temperatures of minus-390 degrees Fahrenheit, these ices can flow like a glacier,” said Bill McKinnon, deputy leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team at Washington University in St. Louis. “In the southernmost region of the heart, adjacent to the dark equatorial region, it appears that ancient, heavily-cratered terrain has been invaded by much newer icy deposits.”

Next, here’s another true color shot, this time of both Pluto and its largest moon Charon. There are many exciting things about what we’re seeing from New Horizons, but one of the thoughts I enjoy most is how all of the school textbooks will need to be updated. I still remember seeing Jupiter and Saturn in full color in junior high school, thanks to Voyager’s then-recent flybys, so to see this happening now for Pluto is just astounding.

NASA said that New Horizons will continue to send data through late 2016, and that currently (at the time of this writing) it’s about 12.2 million miles away from Pluto as it flies deeper into the Kuiper Belt.