Last week NASA revealed the latest awesome images of Pluto from the New Horizons mission. Check out this amazing image of the Cthulhu Regio and Sputnik Planum below. I can see that the image has been horribly compressed when I uploaded it to the blog so it's well worth clicking on this link to the hi res original.
The dark mountainous region is Cthulhu Regio whilst Sputnik Planum is the vast, flat, icy, white expanse. The plain is another example of the puzzling lack of craters on Pluto's surface, which implies a younger age for the surface than anyone had predicted. Contrastingly, Cthulhu is the most heavily cratered, and therefore oldest, region yet seen.
According to Principal Investigator Alan Stern the most surprising thing revealed so far by the mission has been the sheer breadth of geographical features found on Pluto; it's just as varied and interesting as Mars.
The new image is a mosaic made from images downloaded since September 5th when the probe began its year long download of the data it accumulated during the flyby. We're going to need to be patient to get it all but, on the upside, it means there's lots of goodies still to come.
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