On July 14, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft approached 7,800 miles (12,550 km) from Pluto, capturing the first close-up images of that distant and mysterious world.
The photos stunned even the most imaginative researchers and space fanatics, revealing mind-blowing diversity and the complexity of the terrain in the cold. dwarf planet.
Drink Pluto’s famous “heart” whose left lobe is a 600-mile-wide (1,000-kilometer) ice-nitrogen glacier. New Horizons also saw huge mountains of water ice, strange “blade terrains” sculpted from methane ice, and huge ice volcanoes unlike anything planetary scientists have ever seen.
Related:Destiny Pluto: NASA’s New Horizons mission in pictures
“I was stunned” New Horizons Principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, told Space.com. “It is an amazing world, more than we could have asked for.”
Stern has been the driving force behind New Horizons, which flew alongside another object, the distant Arrokoth, in 2019 and is still going strong, from its inception as a concept in the early 1990s. So, to help celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Pluto flyby, Space.com asked Stern to highlight some of his photos. favorites of the epic encounter. Here are 10 that stood out to him, with captions he provided. They are presented in no particular order.
The flyby hemisphere
“This says it all: from the small planet with a heart to the surprising degree of geological diversity and complexity that Pluto revealed,” Stern wrote. (Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute)
Pluto’s “far” side
“The far side of Pluto was only seen in low-resolution images because Pluto rotates only once every six days and we were still three days away and millions of miles away when we saw the far side better. Still, it is incredibly different of the flyby hemisphere and invites us to see this side in more detail again. ” (Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute)
Glacial flow, convection, suction cups, and dunes on a young glacier larger than Texas
“Wow! Pluto Sputnik’s vast nitrogen glacier [Planitia] It is one of the most amazing terrains in the solar system. Take a close look: You won’t see craters, which means it’s very young, but look a little closer and see evidence of ice convection, glacial flows, avalanches, suckers, water icebergs in this sea of nitrogen ice! even dune fields! Wow!” (Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute)
Blue skies
“I love this not only because of Pluto’s seemingly Earth-like blue sky, but also because of the fact that this image was taken after passing Pluto, having achieved a goal that many thought we would never do! and take 26 years to do it! ” (Image credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)
A strong oblique
“This magnificent image reveals both how rugged Pluto’s terrain can be as well as dozens of layers of atmospheric haze amusing itself, spreading to orbital altitudes, no less!” (Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute)
Bladed Land
“The mountainous terrain with blades of Pluto is unlike any other known to us in the solar system; they are science fiction-looking methane ice mountains that extend across much of the opposite extreme and this piece the size of western Colorado in the eastern edge of the flyby hemisphere as well. ” (Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute)
Cryovolcanoes
“Pluto appears to have at least three cryovolcanic terrain styles, including this one, Wright Mons, named for the Wright brothers, who showed us all how to fly. This feature is the scale of Mauna Loa in Hawaii, no less! ” (Image credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)
Old land
“Although some parts of Pluto do not show craters, which means they are geologically young, other parts of the planet are old and battered, dating back to the time of Pluto’s formation more than 4 billion years ago.” (Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute)
A paleo-lake
“Who ordered this? Apparently, an ancient nitrogen lake sits in a rugged mountain valley, haunting forensic evidence of past eras of much higher atmospheric pressure.” (Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute)
Snowfall on the Kuiper Belt
“These mountains rise as high above Pluto as the Rockies rise above our planet, but these mountains are not rocks with water snow at all. They are strange: mountains of water ice frozen by methane snows. Imagine , snowy in the distant Kuiper Belt! ” (Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute)
Mike Wall is the author of “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
