New photos of Pluto from New Horizons!

Spacecraft still has a lot more to send back

Remember those first photos of Pluto sent back by the New Horizons spacecraft?

There is a LOT more where that came from, and let me explain why. You see, unlike many other missions, such as Galileo that orbited Jupiter, Cassini that is still orbiting Saturn, and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that is still orbiting Mars, New Horizons flew by Pluto on its way to visit other distant objects in the Kuiper Belt outside of our solar system.

So, it snapped a whole bunch of photos and gathered a ton of data during the Pluto flyby part of the mission, and will be sending it all back in stages over the next year.

Here's the latest batch of photos, with credit going to NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute.

This is a close view of the heart-shaped area that caught the publics attention.

This is a close view of the heart-shaped area that caught the public's attention.

Here's a closer image of jumbled, broken terrain at the edge of the heart-shaped icy plain.

Another close-up showing quite a variety of terrain just below the heart-shaped icy plain.

A really nice shot of Pluto's largest moon, Charon.

After flying by Pluto, New Horizons "looked back" and snapped this shot of the planet backlight by our sun behind it. You can see Pluto's thin atmosphere!

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