See highest-resolution snapshots of Pluto
The US space agency (NASA) has released a collection of stunning sharp images of Pluto, which are the clearest close-ups of dwarf planet's surface that “humans may see for decades”.
The highest-resolution snapshots were obtained by New Horizons spacecraft during its July flyby of the icy world, when it was some 4.2 billion kilometers (3 billion miles) away from the Earth.
The images show a wide variety of cratered, mountainous and glacial terrains, NASA said in a statement on Friday.
“These new images give us a breathtaking, super-high resolution window into Pluto’s geology. The science we can do with these images is simply unbelievable,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado.
According to the statement, the resolutions of these images are about 77-85 meters (250-280 feet) per pixel – revealing features less than half the size of a city block on the planet’s diverse surface.
Moving faster than any man-made spacecraft ever at a speed of about 50,000 kilometers per hour (30,800 mile per hour), the nuclear-powered New Horizons managed to make its flyby of Pluto at 1149 GMT on July 14, after a decade-long journey.
New Horizons, about the size of a baby grand piano, was launched in 2006 to study Pluto, its moons, particularly Charon, and one or two other Kuiper belt objects as it flies past them. It spent most of its nine-year journey to Pluto in hibernation only to wake up in January.
A Geographical feature on the surface of Pluto, containing a mountainous terrain, has been named Al-Idrisi Montes after Muslim geographer and cartographer Muhammad al-Idrisi, born in 1100.
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