New images of Pluto from New Horizons station

The surface of the dwarf planet Pluto is becoming more visible in the photographs , due to the rather rapid convergence of the probe New Horizons with Pluto. A series of images taken with Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) from May 29 to June 2 shows us the complex structure of a planetoid, with bright and dark terraces, intermediate areas and other surface elements. Now any new snapshot of Pluto, made by New Horizons, can be called the highest quality in the history of observation of the planetoid. By the way, most recently the device photographed all the satellites of Pluto .

Unfortunately, Pluto is still more than 50 million kilometers away, and for an ordinary person the planet in the pictures looks like a foggy spot. Specialists can also extract useful data from such images. A new series of photos was processed in a graphical editor (the processing method is deconvolution), as a result of which some areas of the planet became better distinguishable. As a result of processing, some artifacts appeared in the picture, but they do not prevent scientists from studying photos of Pluto (in particular, Pluto does not seem to be quite spherical, but somewhat deformed, although this is not so).

Since April, the deconvolution method has allowed scientists to identify a wide range of objects on the surface of Pluto, including a bright area at one of the poles, which is already baptized by a “polar cap”. According to experts studying Pluto, the surface of the planet is very different in structure, with a large number of different regions (at least, the brightness in the picture). Previously, some scientists believed that Pluto is a relatively homogeneous body, but now it is already clear that this is not the case.
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Currently, the New Horizons station is 4.7 billion kilometers from Earth, and 39 million kilometers from Pluto (the device managed to fly more than 10 million kilometers from the moment the pictures were taken). Now the spacecraft is in excellent condition, all systems are functioning normally. By the way, a whole gallery of raw photos of Pluto is right here .