Planetary Society logo
  • “Exploration is in our nature.” - Carl Sagan

Bruce Murray Space Image Library

Mountainous shoreline of Sputnik Planum

Mountainous shoreline of Sputnik Planum
Mountainous shoreline of Sputnik Planum In this highest-resolution image from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, great blocks of Pluto’s water-ice crust appear jammed together in the informally named al-Idrisi mountains. The mountains end abruptly at the shoreline of the informally named Sputnik Planum, where the soft, nitrogen-rich ices of the plain form a nearly level surface, broken only by the fine trace work of striking, cellular boundaries and the textured surface of the plain’s ices (which is possibly related to sunlight-driven ice sublimation). This view is about 80 kilometers wide. The top of the image is to Pluto’s northwest. NASA / JHUAPL /SwRI

These images were made with the telescopic Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) aboard New Horizons, in a timespan of about a minute centered on 11:36 UT on July 14 – just about 15 minutes before New Horizons’ closest approach to Pluto – from a range of just 17,000 kilometers. They were obtained with an unusual observing mode; instead of working in the usual “point and shoot,” LORRI snapped pictures every three seconds while the Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC) aboard New Horizons was scanning the surface. This mode requires unusually short exposures to avoid blurring the images.