A breathtaking window into Pluto’s geology (pics+vid)

The new images show details of craters and mountains, along with icy plains

The best photos from the New Horizons spacecraft that buzzed Pluto earlier this year were released by NASA providing resolutions of less than 100 yards per pixel.

NASA also published a video compiled from the sharpest views of Pluto seen so far from New Horizons.

The new images show details of craters and mountains, along with icy plains.

With a 250-280 feet per pixel resolution, they show geographic features that NASA says “would be smaller than half a city block on Pluto’s diverse surface”.

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“These new images give us a breathtaking, super-high resolution window into Pluto’s geology,” New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern says, from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

“Nothing of this quality was available for Venus or Mars until decades after their first flybys; yet at Pluto we’re there already – down among the craters, mountains and ice fields – less than five months after flyby. The science we can do with these images is simply unbelievable.”