NASA's New Horizons probe, which made history by being the first spacecraft to successfully complete a mission to the Pluto system, has sent back its most recent batch of close-ups from its legendary flyby — complete with a breathtaking shot of a bonafide Plutonian sunset.
According to a press statement released by NASA, the photo was taken with a wide-angle Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC) and completed their transmission to Earth on Sept. 13.
The photos themselves were taken on July 14, during the zenith of New Horizons' proximity to the dwarf planet, and capture a span of 780 miles of Pluto's craggy surface, encompassing mountainous terrain — including an 11,000-foot mountain called Norgay Montes, named after the Nepalese Everest climber Tenzing Norgay — and interrupted by a large, smooth terrestrial patch unofficially known as the Sputnik Planum.
Principal investigator of the New Horizons mission Alan Stern noted that, while the image itself is stunning, it's more than eye candy.
"This image really makes you feel you are there, at Pluto, surveying the landscape for yourself ... but this image is also a scientific bonanza, revealing new details about Pluto's atmosphere, mountains, glaciers and plains," he said.
Besides revealing a bit more about Pluto's multivaried topography, the image also clues scientists in to the atmospheric makeup of the dwarf planet, namely a visible "haze" present in the photographs, which, according to scientists, seem to indicate weather shifts and patterns in Pluto's nitrogenic atmosphere. Cap that off with glacial and water cycles that seem to closely mimic the same kind of cycles on Earth, and the pictures are a climate-oriented goldmine.
"Pluto is surprisingly Earth-like in this regard," concluded Stern in the same statement, "and no one predicted it."
Check out some of New Horizons' space shots below, courtesy of NASA.
