Check This Out: New High Resolution Photos of Pluto Here!

NASA: "It's complicated." 

On Thursday, NASA released incredible close-up images of Pluto taken by the New Horizons spacecraft, showing the planet's icy plains, craters, perhaps even dunes on its surface "that have scientists reeling because of their range and complexity."

"Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we've seen in the solar system," says New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado, as reported by NASA. "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," he remarked.

You can view all of the hi-res photos here.

NY Daily News reports that in one image, dark ancient craters are seen to border younger icy plains.

New Horizons sent the first batch of new images and data over the Labor Day weekend. The newest batch of photos the spacecraft sent "have more than doubled the amount of Pluto's surface seen at resolutions as good as 400 meters (440 yards) per pixel," according to NASA.

They reveal new features as diverse as possible dunes, nitrogen ice flows that apparently oozed out of mountainous regions onto plains, and even networks of valleys that may have been carved by material flowing over Pluto's surface. They also show large regions that display chaotically jumbled mountains reminiscent of disrupted terrains on Jupiter's icy moon Europa. 

Besides Pluto, the public can expect on Friday better images of Charon, Nix, and Hydra - the planet's moons. The raw images can be accessed on the New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) site. NASA divulges that each of Pluto's moon is "unique and that big moon Charon's geological past was a tortured one." 

"The surface of Pluto is every bit as complex as that of Mars," says Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. "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," he noted.

William B. McKinnon, a GGI deputy lead from Washington University, St. Louis remarks that if Pluto indeed has dunes, it  would be "completely wild" as Pluto's atmosphere is very thin. "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," he says.

According to NY Daily News, the images captured also show that the atmospheric haze surrounding Pluto is multi-layered. A "bonus" twilight effect is also evident due to the haze created. "This bonus twilight view is a wonderful gift that Pluto has handed to us," said John Spencer, a GGI deputy lead from SwRI, as per NASA. "Now we can study geology in terrain that we never expected to see."

You can follow the New Horizon's mission through https://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons and https://pluto.jhuapl.edu.    

New Horizons is part of NASA's New Frontiers Program, managed by the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, designed, built, and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. SwRI leads the science mission, payload operations, and encounter science planning.