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New Pluto pictures show stunning complexity

NASA unveiled a fresh batch of Pluto pictures Thursday, revealing stunning vistas that include chaotic ice mountains, possible dunes of some sort, nitrogen ice flows and networks of valleys that defy easy explanation.

The photographs, stored aboard the New Horizon's spacecraft since its historic July 14 flyby and downlinked over the past week, show ancient, heavily-cratered terrain adjacent to younger, much smoother plains and backlit shots of the small world's thin atmosphere showing multiple haze layers.

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A "synthetic perspective" view of Pluto based on the latest images from the New Horizons spacecraft show Pluto as it would appear from an altitude of about 1,100 miles. This view looks northeast shows the heavily cratered Cthulhu Regio region and the smooth expanse of icy plains dubbed Sputnik Planum. NASA

Most of the photos in the latest release, taken while New Horizons was about 50,000 miles from Pluto, show surface features just a half-mile across.

"Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we've seen in the solar system," Alan Stern, the New Horizons principal investigator, said in a NASA release.

"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."

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A mosaic of images showing the left side of the heart-shaped Sputnik Planum region showing features as small as a half-mile across. NASA

New Horizons stopped beaming back pictures shortly after the flyby to focus on sending home data on energetic particles, the solar wind and space dust. Photo transmission resumed last Saturday.

NASA said new shots of Pluto, it's large moon Charon and smaller moons Nix and Hydra will be posted Friday on the spacecraft's Long Range Reconnaissance Imager -- LORRI -- website.

"The surface of Pluto is every bit as complex as that of Mars," Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team, said in the release. "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."

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A 220-mile-wide view of dark, cratered terrain and surrounding, younger areas that appear to include dunes of some sort. NASA

Some of the pictures show what appear to be dunes of some sort, a major surprise given Pluto's thin atmosphere and frigid environment.

"Seeing dunes on Pluto -- if that is what they are -- would be completely wild, because Pluto's atmosphere today is so thin," said William McKinnon, deputy lead of the Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team. "Either Pluto had a thicker atmosphere in the past, or some process we haven't figured out is at work. It's a head-scratcher."

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Pluto's large moon Charon, taken 10 hours before New Horizons flew past Pluto on July 14. From the NASA caption: "Charon, which is 750 miles in diameter, displays a surprisingly complex geological history, including tectonic fracturing; relatively smooth, fractured plains in the lower right; several enigmatic mountains surrounded by sunken terrain features on the right side; and heavily cratered regions in the center and upper left portion of the disk. There are also complex reflectivity patterns on Charon's surface, including bright and dark crater rays, and the conspicuous dark north polar region at the top of the image." NASA
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