Colour Photos Released by NASA Reveal Mysterious Dark Spots On Pluto
New colour photos of Pluto released by NASA show the ‘dwarf planet’ as never seen before, revealing a series of mysterious dark spots on the planet’s surface.
The images, taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, show a series of four evenly spaced dark circles grouped together across Pluto’s equator, each one measuring around 300 miles across.
So far, scientists have been left completely baffled as to what they might be.
“It’s a real puzzle—we don’t know what the spots are, and we can’t wait to find out,” said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute.
“Also puzzling is the longstanding and dramatic difference in the colours and appearance of Pluto compared to its darker and grayer moon Charon.”
An artist’s conception of clouds in Pluto’s atmosphere.
The pictures were produced by combining black and white images of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, combined with lower-resolution colour data from the spacecraft to show what the view would look like to the human eye.
NASA hopes to learn more about what the perplexing dark spots may be as the New Horizons probe gets closer to the planet.
The spacecraft will be the first to fly past Pluto on 14 July when it will take further images and detailed measurements of the planet.
However, the dark spots will be on the other side of the planet when the probe flies past, so NASA may not be able to find out more about the mystery spots just yet.
(Image credit: NASA/JHUAPL)
