Pluto Stuns Viewers with New Backlit Panorama Captured by New Horizons Spacecraft

First Posted: Sep 18, 2015 09:13 AM EDT

The latest images from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft are truly spectacular. The new images show a backlit Pluto, revealing the icy planet's massive mountains, streams of frozen nitrogen and haunting low-lying hazes.

The new view of Pluto's crescent offers an oblique look across Plutonian landscapes with dramatic backlighting from the sun. It highlights Pluto's varied terrains and extended atmosphere.

"This image really makes you feel you are there, at Pluto, surveying the landscape for yourself," said Alan Stern, NASA New Horizons Principal Investigator, in a news release. "But this image is also a scientific bonanza, revealing new details about Pluto's atmosphere, mountains, glaciers and plains."

Because of the favorable backlighting and high resolution of the image, it reveals new details of hazes throughout Pluto's extended nitrogen atmosphere. More specifically, the picture shows more than a dozen thin haze layers extending from near the ground to at least 60 miles above the surface. In addition, the image reveals at least one bank of fog-like, low-lying haze illuminated by the setting sun against Pluto's dark side, raked by shadows from nearby mountains.

"We did not expect to find hints of a nitrogen-based glacial cycle on Pluto operating in the frigid conditions of the outer solar system," said Alan Howard, a member of the mission's Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team. "Driven by dim sunlight, this would be directly comparable to the hydrogen cycle that feeds ice caps on Earth, where water is evaporated from the oceans, falls as snow, and returns to the seas through glacial flow."

For more information about the New Horizons mission, visit NASA's website.

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TagsNASA, NASA’s, New Horizons, Planet, pluto, Dwarf Planet, Images, Image