Pluto is super far away. Like waaaay super out there. It's so far away that we're still—months after the fact—receiving pics shots from New Horizon's historic decade-in-the-works wassup with everyone's favorite not-a-planet.
Part of this delayed visual gratification is due to the aforementioned gaping space divide (New Horizons is currently around 4.5 light hours from the Earth), but also because New Horizons is only now getting around to transmitting the full uncompressed snapshots from its Kuiper Belt encounter.
Those first glorious shots of Pluto that filled your social media feeds back in July were specially fast-tracked through the cosmic series of tubes in order to sate everyone's desire to finally see the thing up close.
The initial batch was compressed by New Horizons before transmission, and once they made their way to Earth, all those (comparably low-res images) were sped through NASA's usually laboring bureaucracy machine.
These new images are more representative of how interplanetary emails really work: large, uncompressed images that take a frustratingly long time to transmit. In fact, the whole frozen space shebang will take months to make their way to the public.
But while we wait for the full Plutonian library to make its way home, let's take a moment to appreciate these new (and super duper high-res) shots of Pluto, which show a planet with a dynamic and varied surface.
"Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we've seen in the solar system," said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern in a NASA blog post. "If an artist had painted this Pluto before our flyby, I probably would have called it over the top—but that's what is actually there." It shows a rich tapestry of geographic formations including ice sheets, mountains, mysterious dark areas, and craters of all different ages.
"The surface of Pluto is every bit as complex as that of Mars," said Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. "The randomly jumbled mountains might be huge blocks of hard water ice floating within a vast, denser, softer deposit of frozen nitrogen within the region informally named Sputnik Planum."
No one expected Pluto to look like this. And we should expect even more amazing visual insights in the months to come. In the meantime, take a look at the slideshow above, which includes all the new pictures as well as all the classics from New Horizons' trip so far.
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