The surface of Pluto is becoming better resolved as NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft speeds closer to its July flight through the Pluto system.
A series of new images obtained by the spacecraft’s telescopic Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) during May 29-June 2 show Pluto is a complex world with very bright and very dark terrain as well as areas of intermediate brightness in between. These images afford the best views ever obtained of the Pluto system.
New Horizons scientists used a technique called deconvolution to sharpen the raw, unprocessed pictures (you can find daily versions of the 100-millisecond exposures in the
Approaching Pluto gallery) that the spacecraft beams back to Earth; the contrast in these latest images also has been stretched to bring out additional details. Deconvolution can occasionally produce artifacts, so the team will be carefully reviewing newer images taken from closer range to determine whether some of the tantalizing details seen in the images released today persist. Pluto’s nonspherical appearance in these images is not real; it results from a combination of the image-processing technique and Pluto’s large variations in surface brightness.
Since April, deconvolved images from New Horizons have allowed the science team to identify a wide variety of broad surface markings across Pluto, including the bright area at one pole that scientists believe is a polar cap.