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The United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) revealed on Wednesday new images of Pluto taken by the New Horizons aircraft.
The new photos are a historic achievement. As the New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern explained, these “are just a little bit better than anything that's ever been obtained in history.”
According to the space agency, the pictures released were taken in mid-April, within a distance of less than 70 million miles (113 million kilometers).
The images show the surface of Pluto were bright and dark patches can be distinguished. Scientists believe these patches could be ice caps reflecting light. However the precise origin of these patches is yet unknown.
“It's a mystery — whether these bright and dark regions are caused by geology or topography or composition,” Stern said.
New Horizons also captured in the images Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, rotating in its 6.4-day long orbit.
NASA's New Horizons aircraft is set to make the first-ever flyby of Pluto on July 14.
By this time, NASA's New Horizons will be able to zoom within 7,800 miles (12,500 km) of the icy world's surface.
“We are now on the verge of making real discoveries — the maps and the other data sets that we came to get at the Pluto system,” explained Stern.
NASA's New Horizons mission was launched in 2006, and it aims at revealing more of Pluto, which has remained largely mysterious since its discovery in 1930.
The graph below shows the trajectory of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. After visiting Pluto, it will travel even further from Earth.
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