The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has released new photographs of Pluto that were captured using the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) onboard the spacecraft New Horizons.
According to the space agency, the pictures were taken between May 29 and June 2 as the New Horizons speeds closer to Pluto's system. They provide the best views of the distant dwarf planet ever recorded.
The LORRI photographs show the bright and dark terrain of Pluto's surface, with several areas covered with intermediate brightness.
NASA scientists working on the New Horizons mission made use of a method known as deconvolution to improve the quality of the raw images taken by the spacecraft. They have also stretched the contrast of the photographs to reveal other details.
The research team will continue to carefully analyze newer images beamed back to Earth by the New Horizons as it nears Pluto in order to confirm the features seen on the new photographs of the dwarf planet.
"Even though the latest images were made from more than 30 million miles away, they show an increasingly complex surface with clear evidence of discrete equatorial bright and dark regions-some that may also have variations in brightness," Alan Stern, a specialist from Colorado's Southwest Research Institute and lead investigator of the New Horizons project, said.
"We can also see that every face of Pluto is different and that Pluto's northern hemisphere displays substantial dark terrains, though both Pluto's darkest and its brightest known terrain units are just south of, or on, its equator. Why this is so is an emerging puzzle."
The researchers have been using deconvolved images from the spacecraft to identify a multitude of surface markings on Pluto since April. These include a bright area on the dwarf planet's pole that scientists theorize as its polar cap.
Stern added that the team has also discovered dark and light areas on Pluto's surface using the Hubble Space Telescope. Combined with earlier images from the New Horizons, these latest photographs show a significantly nuanced and complicated surface of Pluto.
He said that they can now study the different surface units of the system to find out what could potentially be causing this phenomenon. He estimates that they will have sufficient spectroscopic data on this occurrence by July.
As of the moment, the New Horizons spacecraft is located around 2.9 billion miles from the Earth and 24 million miles from the Pluto system.
