FRANCE: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has released new photographs of Pluto that were captured using the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) onboard the spacecraft New Horizons.
According to the space agency, the pictures were taken between May 29 and June 2 as the New Horizons speeds closer to Pluto’s system. They provide the best views of the distant dwarf planet ever recorded.
The LORRI photographs show the bright and dark terrain of Pluto’s surface, with several areas covered with intermediate brightness.
NASA scientists working on the New Horizons mission made use of a method known as deconvolution to improve the quality of the raw images taken by the spacecraft. They have also stretched the contrast of the photographs to reveal other details.
The research team will continue to carefully analyze newer images beamed back to Earth by the New Horizons as it nears Pluto in order to confirm the features seen on the new photographs of the dwarf planet.
“Even though the latest images were made from more than 30 million miles away, they show an increasingly complex surface with clear evidence of discrete equatorial bright and dark regions-some that may also have variations in brightness,” Alan Stern, a specialist from Colorado’s Southwest Research Institute and lead investigator of the New Horizons project, said.
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