NASA’s New Horizons Reveals Jagged Shores Of Pluto

The American space agency’s New Horizons spacecraft captured yet another spectacular image of Pluto that shows its rugged and dark highlands, known as Krun Macula. The New Horizons probe is in the process of sending back a series of photos that it took of the icy dwarf planet, during a close fly by during July 2015. However, because of the great distance between Earth and the position of the spacecraft, it is going to be a while before earthlings can view the photos because of the time taken by them to reach us.

The Krun Macula is reportedly located on the borders of icy plains on Pluto, with an elevation of 2.5 kilometers above the surrounding plain known informally as the Sputnik Planum. The plain is marked by groups of connected circular kind of pits that have an approximate depth of up to 2.5 kilometers and width of 8 and 13 kilometers across.

The Jagged Shores of #Pluto’s Highlands. https://t.co/fPIsMqythc pic.twitter.com/sV7PAvi60U

— NASA New Horizons (@NASANewHorizons) June 10, 2016

The image seen here was created with three separate observations made by the spacecraft last year in July. The right side of the photo is made of 80 meter per pixel data from the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), captured from a distance of 15,850 kilometers away from Pluto, which was approximately around 23 minutes before the spacecraft made its closest approach to the dwarf planet. The left side of the image is created with 125 meter per pixel LORRI data, gathered about six minutes earlier when the New Horizons was 24,900 kilometers away from Pluto.

The right and left side of the image respectively represent parts of the highest and second highest resolution images obtained by the New Horizons probe in the Pluto system. Later on, the entire photo was colorized with 680 meter per pixel data from New Horizons’ Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC), taken at 33,900 kilometers from Pluto, approximately 45 minutes before its closest position to the icy body.

The New Horizons probe was launched in January New Horizons with the aim to observe the formation of the Pluto system, Kuiper belt as well as the early solar system’s transformation. The spacecraft flew 12,500 kilometers above Pluto’s surface on July 14 2015, making it the first to explore the icy dwarf planet at such close quarters. At the moment the New Horizons spacecraft is headed farther into the Kuiper belt to study a small celestial body called 2014 MU69, around 1.6 billion kilometers beyond Pluto. Currently, the spacecraft is at a distance of about 5.15 billion kilometers from our planet.