NASA Images State That Pluto Had Colors

Tech

(Photo : Youtube) The dragon scale appearance of Tartarus Dorsa on Pluto that is captured by NASA's New Horizons mission.

On Sept. 24, Thursday, the United States National Space Agency released the highest-resolution images of Pluto to date.

The agency's spacecraft called New Horizons continues to transfer intensive yearlong data, according to The Market Business. The gallery includes data from the spacecraft's infrared spectrometer that mapped the distribution of methane ice on the dwarf planet Pluto.

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The data downloaded previously provided stunning imagery as well as scientific insights regarding on the nature of Pluto. Vast icy plains, mountain ranges and proof of hydrological cycle at work in the dwarf planet's atmosphere were seen and observed.

The new photographs, however, add another chapter of exploring this mysterious celestial body. One photo in particular has taken the New Horizons team aback because the featured landscape of aligned ridges, which give the surface a snakeskin-like or dragon scales appearance, can be clearly seen.

The spacecraft's Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera captured the said photo that contains the Tartarus Dorsa mountain view, which was highlighted beautifully in the shot by the terminator line.

Aside from this, the new release has an extended color view of the dwarf planet that enhanced Pluto's natural hues with the infrared channel of the camera to emphasize the myriad colors that saturate the surface of the unusual dwarf planet.

The colorful pictures, as stated by Nature World Report, showed the exciting and high-resolution views that beamed back from the Kuiper belt -- making planetary scientists to merely have a vague idea as to what could be going on in the said dwarf planet. The photos showed rainbow of yellows, pale blues, deep reds and oranges, and many landforms have their very own distinct colors that tell a wonderful but complex climatological and geological story that has just begun to be decoded.

The mission to Pluto started in 2006, and these latest data sent by NASA's spacecraft did surely show a strange new world that tells people about other bodies in the solar system and its fringes.

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Source: NASA Images State That Pluto Had Colors