NASA shares more Pluto images from New Horizons

BOULDER, Colo., Sept. 11 (UPI) -- After a few weeks of silence, the Pluto photo parade is back in action. On Friday, NASA released a new roll of images beamed back by the intrepid probe, New Horizons.

The new images include additional close-ups of Pluto's rugged beauty -- the sphere's surface features revealed in new range and detail.

"Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we've seen in the solar system," Alan Stern, a researcher at the Southwest Research Institute and lead scientists on the New Horizons project, said in a press release. "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."

Among the stunning images are a variety of landforms: rugged mountains, shadowed valleys, expansive plains, snaking ice flows, cragged craters and much more.

"The surface of Pluto is every bit as complex as that of Mars," said Jeff Moore, a lead scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center whose team is in charge of processing the images of Pluto's geography.

"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," Moore added.

Except during the initial flyby (when it was capturing all the great imagery), New Horizons never actually went silent. Ever since it first flew by the distant dwarf planet, New Horizons has been beaming back images and scientific data. But the onslaught of data, arriving in a steady stream, was too overwhelming for scientists to process and release at a constant pace.