You haven't seen Pluto until you see it in color
Pluto is looking stunning
NASA has released some of the highest-resolution colour images of Pluto from New Horizons, to give us a stunning look at the dwarf planet.
In the image above, which is part of a larger swath, has had color details added using New Horizons' wide-angle Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera.
"Pluto's surface colors were enhanced in this view to reveal subtle details in a rainbow of pale blues, yellows, oranges, and deep reds," NASA explained.
"Many landforms have their own distinct colors, telling a wonderfully complex geological and climatological story that we have only just begun to decode."
In the image above, it almost looks like you're looking at the Star Wars planet, Tatooine, as in the entire high-resolution swath, which you can see here, you can see areas that look like dunes, and what NASA says an older shoreline of a shrinking glacial ice lake, and fractured ice mountains with sheer cliffs.
NASA also released an image of Pluto, that it says looks more "like tree bark or dragon scales than geology."
"It's a unique and perplexing landscape stretching over hundreds of miles," said William McKinnon, the New Horizons' Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team's deputy lead.
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You can check out more of the images on NASA's site, and we expect to see more high-res images of Pluto to emerge in the coming weeks.
- NASA last week released a video that lets you go on an aerial tour of Pluto
Image credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI