In a photo released by NASA, New Horizons' captured photo was turned into what appeared to be a psychedelic-like photo of Pluto highlighting the distinct regions of its surface. Scientists made a false color image of Pluto using a technique called principal component analysis.
The New Horizon spacecraft was launched in 2006 and successfully performed a historic flyby to the dwarf planet on July 14 sending back series of photos depicting how the planet looks. Scientists provided the false color image of Pluto to show distinct regions by highlighting the texture and composition of the planet's surface.
"New Horizons scientists made this false colour image of Pluto using a technique called principal component analysis to highlight the many subtle colour differences between Pluto's distinct regions," NASA said in a statement.
The images were captured by the spacecraft's Ralph/MVIC colour camera from a range of 22,000 miles. Later that day, New Horizons was recorded to be at 7,750 miles from the world's surface during its closest approach.
Presented at the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in National Harbor, Maryland, Will Grundy of the New Horizon's surface composition team, the photo shows which regions on Pluto's surface are similar and those who are massively different.
On Nov.9, scientists from New Horizons team said that there are two distinct surfaces in Pluto as captured by the spacecraft's camera. These two peaks are as high as four miles from the surface of the dwarf planet and could entail that they could be volcanoes.
These two peaks were named Wright Mons and Picard Mons, which both have central craters. Scientists also found that Pluto has a far younger surface than they expected and they claim that 'something' is keeping the planet warm from the inside.
"These are two really extraordinary features," Oliver White, a New Horizons postdoctoral researcher said.
"Nothing like this has ever been seen in the solar system. Whatever they are, they're definitely weird," he added.
However, these volcano-like surfaces found on Pluto would not necessarily contain molten rock or lava like what volcanoes on Earth do.
NASA explained that cyrovolcanoes or ice volcanoes would erupt with methane, ammonia, nitrogen or water ice.
