NASA Releases More Glorious Close-Ups Of Pluto And Its Moons From New Horizons

The li’l “planet” that could has been thrust into the spotlight this week, as NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft delivered new close-up images of Pluto’s surface and its moons. Take fucking that, Saturn, Uranus, Mars, the other ones. It’s Pluto’s time. 

Sharp new images showing unprecedented detail of Pluto’s and one of its moon’s Charon’s surface have been revealed overnight—adding to images debuted earlier this week—with gargantuan ice mountains 3.5km high being revealed with high res photos from New Horizon’s space craft LORRI, during its five billion kilometre journey that began in 2006.

With the reveal of images overnight, a New York Times science writer pointed out that the high-detail images were at first confusing for NASA to digest.

As usual after the first look at a planet, nobody knows anything #pluto

— Dennis Overbye (@overbye) July 15, 2015

At a briefing unveiling the new images, researcher John Spencer claimed the new discoveries left NASA at odds with their new information, but blissfully so: 

“There’s been erosion, there’s been mountain building,” he says, “and it’s baffling, it’s baffling in a very interesting and wonderful way. I hope that when we get some more context, it’ll start to make some sense.”

A zoom into Pluto’s fascinating mountain ranges might not say much to the naked eye, but will soon be speaking volumes to NASA’s researchers:

Mountains on Pluto! This movie zooms into the base of the heart-shaped feature on Pluto to highlight a new image captured by our New Horizons spacecraft. The new image, seen in black and white against a previously released color image of Pluto, shows a mountain range with peaks jutting as high as high as 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) above the surface of the icy body. Image credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI nasa #pluto #plutoflyby #newhorizons#solarsystem #nasabeyond #science

A video posted by NASA (@nasa) on Jul 15, 2015 at 1:06pm PDT

Images were also released of Charon, one of Pluto’s “youthful” moons of less than 100 million years old (context: younger than the Himalayas), revealing its badass dark side, already nicknamed as Mordor:

NEW: Pluto’s largest moon Charon has youthful terrain & dark area nicknamed ‘Mordor’ in north: http://t.co/fNUDVAOW5h pic.twitter.com/JOWaoD1sdy

— NASA (@NASA) July 15, 2015

There’s also its bb potato-like moon.

Pluto’s tiny potato-shaped moon Hydra emerges from shadows during @NASANewHorizons #PlutoFlyby http://t.co/z9xMO7Mci7 pic.twitter.com/0YdLOuGxep

— NASA (@NASA) July 15, 2015

The detail obtained by LORRI here is straight up astounding. 

Today, the @NASANewHorizons team is bringing what was previously a blurred point of light into focus. pic.twitter.com/AswUMZFxqd

— NASA (@NASA) July 15, 2015

But most importantly, here is this whole story in a nutshell, to break your weak heart. 

A current insight into NASA’s discoveries on Pluto this week can be found here.

Via The Guardian.
Lead image via NASA twitter.