New Bizarre Images of ‘Snakeskin’ Terrain on Pluto

Scientists are perplexed and mystified by the latest images downloaded from the New Horizons probe’s flyby of Pluto. One of the images reveals a landscape that “…looks more like tree bark or dragon scales than geology,” according to William McKinnon, New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team deputy lead from Washington University in St. Louis.

Take a look at this astounding image from the fascinating article we found on the NASA.gov site:

pluto-snakeskin2
In this extended color image of Pluto taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, rounded and bizarrely textured mountains, informally named the Tartarus Dorsa, rise up along Pluto’s day-night terminator and show intricate but puzzling patterns of blue-gray ridges and reddish material in between. This view, roughly 330 miles (530 kilometers) across, combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC) on July 14, 2015, and resolves details and colors on scales as small as 0.8 miles (1.3 kilometers). Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SWR

McKinnon continues, “This’ll really take time to figure out; maybe it’s some combination of internal tectonic forces and ice sublimation driven by Pluto’s faint sunlight.”

See other amazing images from the latest download in the informative article on NASA.gov.

 

Source: NASA.gov – “Perplexing Pluto: New ‘Snakeskin’ Image and More from New Horizons”